This meditation on subjectivity draws on mundane and explicitly political contexts to argue for mathematics education practices that help us understand how people use mathematics to shape our world. I use two contexts to consider how to develop citizens who understand how we are subjugated by mathematical systems (designed and sustained by…

In this article, I argue that the common practice across many school mathematics curricula of using a variety of different representations of number may diminish the coherence of mathematics for students. Instead, I advocate prioritising a single representation of number (the number line) and applying this repeatedly across diverse content areas.…

The aim of this study is to explore the possibility of introducing the general notions of function and inverse function through a mathematical activity on linear functions, focusing on the quantitative meaning associated to the connection between a relation and its inverse. We present a genetic decomposition, that is, a viable cognitive path for…

Pairing the mid-century work of Ada Dietz (1882-ca. 1970) with two compelling contemporary projects from Sonya Clark (1967- ), this article considers the ways in which normative mathematical ideas are remade through their engagement with weaving practice. Highlighting recent efforts to further ethnomathematics' original decolonial intentions, I…

This paper seeks to integrate a scholarship of "ritual" with a scholarship of "improvisation" and relate the intersection thereof with mathematics teaching and learning and with mathematics education research. Drawing on their experiences as classroom teachers, as practicing improvisers, and as current education researchers,…

This comment on Gascón & Nicolás (2017) explores relationships between mathematics education research and conceptualizations of time. Using Fabian's critique of temporal perspectives in anthropological research (1983) and Lemke's framework of timescales (2000), we consider ways in which implicit attitudes towards time in research can position…

Literature has already shown that gestures play a relevant role in classroom interactions between students and teacher. We integrate the perspective of Theory of Semiotic Mediation with the notion of Semiotic Bundle to illustrate how gestures can be used as "pivot signs" in semiotic chains. This means that gestures can be performed by…

We present a synthesis of the Onto-semiotic Approach (OSA) theoretical system to mathematical knowledge and instruction, while highlighting the problems, principles and research methods that are addressed in this approach and considering the didactics of mathematics as a scientific and technological discipline. We suggest that Didactics should…

Certain aspects of theoretical frameworks in mathematics education can remain unexplained in the literature, hence unnoticed by the readers. It is thus interesting to participate in a dialogue where they can be discussed and compared in terms of the aims, objects studied, results and their relation to teaching. This study is focused on how APOS…

The literature concerning students' understanding of the equal sign has focused narrowly within the context of formal mathematics. Researchers have put forth a hierarchy of conceptions of the equal sign with only the top level regarded as correct. Meanwhile, we find that the equal sign is used widely and in a variety of ways in advertising and…

Critical to constructing and interpreting graphs is an individual's understanding of the underlying coordinate systems, yet coordinate systems are often overlooked or taken-for-granted in both mathematics education research and curricula. In this paper, we foreground coordinate systems and present a distinction between two uses of coordinate…

"Where Mathematics Comes From" (Lakoff & Núñez 2000) proposed that mathematical concepts such as arithmetic and counting are constructed cognitively from embodied metaphors of actions on physical objects, and four actions, or 'grounding metaphors' in particular: collecting, stepping, constructing and measuring. This article argues…

Value judgments, prescriptions and proscriptions concerning instructional proposals seem to be very frequent in works in Didactics (papers, communications,…). In this paper we tackle the question of whether claims of this kind are legitimate. In few words, we wonder whether didactics can say how to teach. For that, we analyse and compare the…

"The root of 18 is closer to 4 than it is to 5 because 18 is closer to 16 than it is to 25". Is this statement, voiced in an 8th grade class, valid? We suggest hypothetical arguments upon which this statement might be based, and analyze them from two complementary perspectives--epistemic and pedagogical--drawing on Toulmin's notion of…

In this article, we consider the potential influences of the study of proofs in advanced mathematics on secondary mathematics teaching. Thus far, the literature has highlighted the benefits of applying the conclusions of particular proofs to secondary content and of developing a more general sense of disciplinary practices in mathematics in…