It is commonplace in the educational literature on mathematical practice to argue for a general conclusion from isolated quotations from famous mathematicians. In this paper, we supply a critique of this mode of inference. We review empirical results that show the diversity and instability of mathematicians' opinions on mathematical practice.…

Resulting from the collaboration between five practicing professionals and an LIS faculty member, this article illuminates the experiences of librarians and archivists who engage with LIS students on a continuous basis as guest speakers in LIS classrooms. The phenomenological approach helps to elicit first-hand accounts that encapsulate…

Interdisciplinary dialogue can help progress and improve professional fields. Progress and improvement may be impeded by barriers within an interdisciplinary dialogue, two of which are false dichotomies and faulty generalizations. It is our opinion that this particular interdisciplinary dialogue will advance productively by avoiding: false…

The secondary-school mathematics curriculum is narrow in scope and technical in character; this is quite different from the nature of the discipline itself. As a result, it offers little inspiration to both students and teachers, and provides students with poor preparation for university mathematics courses and indeed for life. Over the past…

In February of 2009, the "Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness" ("JVIB") published the first articles under the heading of Practice Perspectives. These articles featured work by three professionals who described how they taught reading to children or adults. The feature reflects the commitment of the American Foundation…

This paper is positioned at the junction between the requirements of the manufacturing industry for a significantly increased number of professionally registered engineers in the UK employment pool and the excellent work which is ongoing in and around the education sector to encourage more young people to follow a career in this field. Higher…

The NCTM Research Committee identifies key influences on mathematics education that are largely outside the domain of the academic world in which most mathematics education researchers live. The groups that are identified--including the media, companies and foundations, and other academic domains--affect the public's perception of mathematics and…

The received view of mathematical practice is that mathematicians gain certainty in mathematical assertions by deductive evidence rather than empirical or authoritarian evidence. This assumption has influenced mathematics instruction where students are expected to justify assertions with deductive arguments rather than by checking the assertion…

In response to "The Child Welfare Cartel," defenders of the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (NCWWI) make three errors: First, restricting federal funds to schools of social work is "not" authorized by the statute cited in the creation of NCWWI. Second, social work is "not" the only discipline engaged in…

n a recent article, Inglis and Alcock (2012) contended that their data challenge the claim that when mathematicians validate proofs, they initially skim a proof to grasp its main idea before reading individual parts of the proof more carefully. This result is based on the fact that when mathematicians read proofs in their study, on average their…

In a recent article published in this journal, Shanahan, Shanahan, and Misischia investigated the differences in how chemists, historians, and mathematicians read text specific to their disciplines. Unlike the chemists and historians, the pair of mathematicians in this study did not consider sources when reading and evaluating their text. In this…

In many STEM-related fields, graduating doctoral students are often expected to assume a postdoctoral position as a prerequisite to a faculty position, yet there is no such expectation in mathematics education. This phenomenon is likely due in large part to an abundance of faculty positions; however, it may also result from the field's…

Why have an organisation like MERGA? This question will be addressed from past, present and future perspectives (1976, 2012, and 2025). One focus of the paper will be the need to improve mathematics curricula, and to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics, at all levels. I shall argue that we have not done enough to make sure that MERGA…

In this article, the author talks about the growing pattern of migration experiences for professional people and the impact these have on the well-being of the family as a whole and individual family members who reside outside their home countries for prescribed periods of time. It is easy to argue that the experiences of such families are far…

This paper examines the learning gained from facilitating four action-learning sets whose members were drawn from management teams of local authority, health, education and police, working in partnership. Facilitation posed a series of difficult choices which impacted on personal and organizational dynamics within and between the partnership…