See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/319872845

Exploring different theoretical frontiers for different (and uncertain)

possibilities in mathematics education research

Chapter · September 2017

CITATIONS READS

17 648

2 authors:

David W. Stinson Margaret Walshaw

Georgia State University Massey University
70 PUBLICATIONS   1,077 CITATIONS    134 PUBLICATIONS   1,573 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Education policy View project

All content following this page was uploaded by David W. Stinson on 23 May 2020.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

Stinson, D. W., & Walshaw, M. A. (2017). Exploring different theoretical frontiers for different (and uncertain)
possibilities in mathematics education research. In J. Cai (Ed.), Compendium for research in mathematics education
(pp. 128–155). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
6
T
he charge from the editor to write this chapter
was to provide an introduction to theoretical tra-
ditions being used to challenge the status quo; tra-
ditions that provide new parts of the conversation
and new ways of understanding things; traditions
that build on existing theories but change them as
well. Here, with this charge in mind, we do not provide a
comprehensive review or survey of the different theoret-
ical traditions that a mathematics education researcher
might take up while she or he conducts research. Nor do
we make arguments or justifications for particular the-
oretical traditions that we believe researchers should
take up as the discipline of mathematics education con-
tinues to develop as a research domain (Sierpinska &
Kilpatrick, 1998). Our arguments for particular theo-
retical traditions are clearly expressed elsewhere in our
published research and scholarship (e.g., Stinson, 2008,
2009, 2013b; Stinson & Bullock, 2012; Walshaw, 2001,
2004, 2007, 2013). Our intent here is not to persuade but
rather to inform, not to close down conversations but
rather to open up conversations. In the end, we hope to
provoke discomforting yet somehow comforting con-
versations about different possibilities for mathematics
education research and, in turn, different possibilities
for mathematics teaching and learning.
The chapter has three sections. In the first section,
Theory in Mathematics Education Research, we provide
a historical sketch of changes in theoretical consider-
ations within mathematics education research over the
past 50 years or so and position these changes within
the larger field of education social science. We then map
the major theoretical shifts or moments in mathemat-
ics education research as it has evolved into a research
domain in and of itself. This first section provides a his-
128
Exploring Different
Theoretical Frontiers for
Different (and Uncertain)
Possibilities in Mathematics
Education Research
David W. Stinson
Georgia State University, United States
Margaret Walshaw
Massey University, New Zealand
torical context for the second section, Exploring Dif-
ferent Theoretical Frontiers. Here we aim to illustrate
how theoretical traditions that are not necessarily new
but new to mathematics education research contribute
to the conversation, offering new ways of understand-
ing things that, in the end, often disrupt the status quo.
These “new” traditions provide different ways to think
and rethink the possibilities (and impossibilities) of math-
ematics education research. In the brief concluding
section, Theoretical Considerations for the Future, we
raise questions for mathematics education researchers to
consider as we recap where we have been and where we
might go theoretically. And we make a closing argument
about the productive possibilities of embracing different
theoretical traditions for the community of those who call
themselves mathematics education researchers.
Throughout each section, we provide examples to illus-
trate how different theoretical traditions ask different
questions; suggest different methods for data collection,
analysis, and representation; and, in the end, open up dif-
ferent possibilities for mathematics teaching and learning
for researchers, teacher educators, classroom teachers,
students, and policy makers. Be aware though, as we dis-
cuss broad theoretical traditions we often focus on only
two or three key scholars within that tradition. This nar-
row focus is not to suggest that the work of these scholars
represents the definitive word in that tradition but rather
to use limited space wisely. We do, however, provide cita-
tions to other thinkers within traditions to provide read-
ers with a starting point to explore further. But before we
begin, an important caveat is needed: although the dis-
cussion pulls significantly from the work of international
(i.e., non-U.S. based) scholars and researchers, it is lim-
ited to research and scholarship that was either initially
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
published in English or available in English translation.
As such, the discussion is significantly and inevitably
bounded by and through Anglophone ways of knowing
and being (see Meaney, 2013; Stinson, 2013a).
Theory in Mathematics Education Research
Over the past half-century, mathematics education
research could be characterized as shifting from searches
for certainty to acknowledgments of doubt (cf. Skovsmose,
2009). In this section, we outline this shift by discussing
both the absence and the emergence of theoretical discus-
sions in mathematics education research during the past
50 years. We also describe what is meant by the terms
theoretical tradition or theory in the context of this chap-
ter. The discussion overall is historically contextualized
within the paradigm wars of social science research. We
conclude the section by mapping shifts in theoretical tra-
ditions of mathematics education research onto broader
paradigms of inquiry found in the social sciences.
The Absence of Theoretical Discussions
The number of discussions about theory in mathemat-
ics education has grown from being nearly nonexistent
in the 1960s to filling a visible and frequently contested
space for productive scholarly debate in more recent
times. For instance, in the mid-to-late-1990s, Steffe,
Kieren, Thompson, and Lerman debated the often-
dichotomized theoretical traditions of radical construc-
tivism and social constructivism (Lerman, 1996, 2000a;
Steffe & Kieren, 1994; Steffe & Thompson, 2000). In the
late 2000s, Gutiérrez and Lubienski debated the uses
(or not) of broad sociocultural and sociopolitical theo-
ries and methods when reporting on the mathematics
“achievement gap” (R. Gutiérrez, 2008a; Lubienski,
2008; Lubienski & Gutiérrez, 2008). And Confrey and
Battista (Battista, 2010; Confrey, 2010), individually, in
the early 2010s, responded to D. B. Martin, Gholson, and
Leonard’s (2010) rejoinder to the assumptive question:
“Where’s the math (in mathematics education research)?”
(Heid, 2010, p. 102). These debates hinged largely on the
theoretical traditions taken up by the researchers, which,
in turn, determined what questions might be asked and
how data might be collected, analyzed, and represented.
As Lester and Wiliam (2000) have noted—
The relation between knowledge claims and evidence involves
more than simply establishing a logical connection between
the two. Instead, the relation is determined, in large part,
by a set of beliefs, values, and perspectives operating in the
129
context in which the empirical data are being [collected and]
assessed. (p. 136)
The productive theoretical debates that have engaged
mathematics education researchers since the 1990s are
in stark contrast to the debates (or lack thereof) from
the 1960s and 1970s. In those early developmental years
of mathematics education research, the chief method of
establishing legitimacy for the field was for researchers
to align themselves with the existing epistemologies of
mathematics and the developing theories of psychology
(Kilpatrick, 1992). This allegiance was formally instituted
in 1976 when the International Group for Psychology of
Mathematics Education (PME) was founded during the
3rd International Congress for Mathematical Education
(ICME-3). Overall, in research reporting during these early
developmental years, theoretical considerations were
merely implicit. When researchers discussed theory, it was
most often in the context of developing a single theory or
theoretical network specific to research on mathematics
teaching and learning (e.g., J. P. Becker, 1970).
The Emergence of Theoretical Discussions
The allegiance to “traditional” psychology began to wane
in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as theories (and method-
ologies) were adapted from the disciplines of anthropol-
ogy, cultural and social psychology, history, philosophy,
and sociology (Lester & Lambdin, 2003). Over three
decades ago, Higginson (1980) proposed that mathemat-
ics education be informed not simply by mathematics
and psychology, but also by sociology and philosophy.
He noted that allegiance to mathematics is self-evident
and that the “battle for the recognition of a psychological
dimension in mathematics education has been won, for
almost all purposes, for some time now” (p. 4). Higginson
then made a two-pronged argument for the recognition
of a sociological dimension: (1) the need to more fully
understand the social role of schooling and the inter-
personal and intrapersonal dynamics among teachers,
students, and the mathematics being taught and learned
and (2) the need to more fully understand the influences
of cultural values, economic conditions, social structures,
and emerging technologies on schools generally and on
teaching and learning specifically.
In arguing for the inclusion of philosophy, Higginson
(1980) cautiously noted that with the inclusion of sociol-
ogy, “it might appear [to some] that the gates have been
open too far already” (p. 4). But for Higginson, the inclu-
sion of philosophical considerations in mathematics edu-
cation (research or otherwise) was important because all
130 ◆ foundations
human “intellectual activity is based on a set of assump-
tions of a philosophical type” (p. 4). These assumptions,
he argued—
will vary from discipline to discipline and between indi-
viduals and groups within a discipline. They may be explic-
itly acknowledged or only tacitly so, but they will always
exist. Reduced to their essence these assumptions deal with
concerns such as the nature of “knowledge”, “being”, “good”,
“beauty”, “purpose” and “value”. More formally we have,
respectively, the fields of epistemology, ontology, ethics,
aesthetics, teleology and axiology. More generally we have the
issues of truth, certainty and logical consistency. (p. 4)
Higginson’s (1980) point was soon taken up. For exam-
ple, in 1984 a new Topic Study Group on Theory in Math-
ematics Education [TME] was formed at ICME-5. The
purpose of the group, as Steiner (1985) summarized, was
“to give mathematics education a higher degree of self-
reflectedness and self-assertiveness, to promote another
way of thinking and of looking at the problems and their
interrelations” (p. 16; emphasis in original). Steiner also
provided a list of 10 topics that the TME Group might
explore in the future:
  1. Different definitions of mathematics education as a
discipline.
  2. The use of models, paradigms, theories in mathematic
[sic] education research. The state of the art. Tools for
analysis.
  3. Micro- vs. macro-models.
  4. “Home-grown theories” vs. interdisciplinarity, trans­-
disciplinarity.
  5. Relations between theory and practice.
  6. The place and role of mathematics education in academic
institutions, especially universities.
  7. The ethical, societal and political aspects of mathematics
education.
  8. The need for comprehensive approaches. Self-referential
and self-applicable theories. The role of a systems view.
  9. Complementarity and activity theory.
10. Types of meta-research. (p. 16)
Mathematics education research of the 1990s and
beyond certainly reflects this list of topics, broadening
not only possible theoretical traditions that might be
taken up but also expanding the very identity of math-
ematics education as a research domain (see Sierpinska
& Kilpatrick, 1998). By way of example, conferences held
since the mid-1980s include Political Dimensions of Math-
ematics Education (1990, 1993, 1995); Critical Mathe-
matics Education: Toward a Plan for Cultural Power and
Social Change (1990); Mathematics Education and Soci-
ety (1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2013, 2015);
and Mathematics Education and Contemporary Theory
(2011, 2013, 2016). Furthermore, edited books published
since that time include Equity in Mathematics Educa-
tion: Influences of Feminism and Culture (Rogers & Kaiser,
1995); Ethnomathematics: Challenging Eurocentrism in
Mathematics Education (A. B. Powell & Frankenstein,
1997); Sociocultural Research on Mathematics Education
(Atweh, Forgasz, & Nebres, 2001); Which Way Social Jus-
tice in Mathematics Education (Burton, 2003); Mathemat-
ics Education within the Postmodern (Walshaw, 2004);
and Culturally Responsive Mathematics Education (Greer,
Mukhopadhyay, Powell, & Nelson-Barber, 2009). These
listings are by no means exhaustive but merely illustra-
tive of the conferences and books that have assisted in
shifting mathematics education research beyond its psy-
chological and mathematical roots.
Theory Defined in This Context
Conferences and books like those mentioned above have
indeed contributed to the broadening of theoretical and
methodological traditions within mathematics education
research. However, we have not yet defined or described
what we mean by theoretical tradition or theory within the
context of this chapter. This is an intentional omission.
In our view, theory often conveys different meanings
and assumes different purposes. For instance, Sriraman
and English (2010) have drawn attention to the notion of
a “grand” theory sought by some researchers (e.g., J. P.
Becker, 1970; Silver & Herbst, 2007), whereas Lester
(2005) has suggested that mathematics education
researchers adapt theoretical concepts and ideas from a
range of perspectives. Brown and Walshaw (2012) have
argued that mathematics education researchers use
“theory as a vehicle for new productive possibilities in
mathematics education” (p. 3).
These different purposes signal that theory is being
conceptualized at different levels. To that end, E. A.
St. Pierre (personal communication, June 2000) has
proposed a three-tier structure for discussing theory:
high-level, mid-level, and ground-level theories. High-level
theories are the larger philosophical traditions in which a
researcher might position her or his science (e.g., analytic
philosophy or continental philosophy). These traditions
rest on a set of assumptions about epistemology, ontology,
ethics, aesthetics, teleology, and axiology or, more sim-
ply stated, about truth, certainty, and logical consistency
(Higginson, 1980). Mid-level theories are the various
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
theoretical traditions and ideas that might be derived
from one or more broader philosophical traditions
(e.g., activity theory, cognitive theory, constructivist the-
ory, critical theory, poststructural theory, sociocultural
theory; see Cobb, 2007, for a full discussion of mid-level
theories often used in mainstream mathematics education
research). Ground-level theories, not to be confused with
grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), are the theories
or models developed or used to make sense of the data
collected during data analysis; that is, the theory that is
on the ground, closest to the data (e.g., cognitively guided
instruction; see, e.g., Fennema et al., 1996).
To illustrate, consider the growing body of research
on teaching mathematics for social justice (e.g., Gutstein
& Peterson, 2013; Wager & Stinson, 2012). The high-level
theory for this line of inquiry draws on Marxism and the
philosophical and theoretical assumptions originating
out of the Frankfurt School (see Rush, 2004). Mid-level
theories include, among others, critical theory and cri­
tical pedagogy, with the latter being a theory that can
frame both instruction and research (e.g., Leistyna,
Woodrum, & Sherblom, 1996; McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007).
And ground-level theories comprise the various models
being used to explain or describe how teachers might
teach and students might learn mathematics for social
justice (e.g., Gutstein’s, 2006, model for teaching math-
ematics for social justice, subsequently discussed). It is
important to note, however, that a specific ground-level
theory is only possible through the set of philosophical
and theoretical assumptions, beliefs, values, and per-
spectives operating in the context of the high- and mid-
level theories taken up by the researcher (E. A. St. Pierre,
personal communication, June 2014). The danger in too
much of the existing mathematics education research,
however, is that researchers often do not acknowledge
the philosophical assumptions present in the high- and
mid-level theories that make the ground-level theories
they develop or use possible.
In this chapter, our focus is on high- and mid-level theo-
ries, or what taken together could be called the paradigm
of inquiry in which the researcher resides. That is, when
using the word theory or the phrase theoretical tradition
we are concerned about the epistemological stance of the
researcher as she or he conducts research within a set of
assumptions about truth, certainty, and logical consis-
tency, being mindful that science, social or otherwise,
is always already entangled with and in these broader
concerns of philosophy (St. Pierre, 2011). Furthermore,
although some of the theoretical traditions we highlight
are new to the research domain of mathematics educa-
tion, we specifically use the term different rather than
131
new in our discussion because they are neither new to the
research domains of social science generally nor to edu-
cation specifically.
The Paradigm Wars and Education Research
Generally speaking, the broadening of theoretical tra­
ditions in mathematics education has been played out
in the larger paradigm wars of education social science
(see Gage, 1989; Guba & Lincoln, 1994; Lather, 2006;
Lincoln & Guba, 2000; St. Pierre, 2006). The use of Kuhn’s
(1962/1996) concept paradigm is meant to describe shifts
in the traditions of “normal science” (i.e., firmly based
historical traditions of science) that are differentiated
not by failure of one method to another but rather by the
“incommensurable ways of seeing the world differently
and of practicing science in it” (p. 4). Although the use
of the term paradigm in social science research has been
contested (see Donmoyer, 2006), Guba and Lincoln
(1994) have pointed out that inquiry paradigms high-
light for researchers “what it is they are about, and what
falls within and outside the limits of legitimate inquiry”
(p. 108). Inquiry paradigms, they have argued, are defined
by responses to three fundamental and interconnected
questions—the ontological question, the epistemologi-
cal question, and the methodological question. The three
questions are interconnected “because the answer given
to any one question, taken in any order, [more times than
not] constrains how the others may be answered” (p. 108).
Much has been written in the past 50 years or so about
the beginning (early 1960s), the aftermath (late 1980s),
and the resurgence (early 2000s) of the paradigm wars
(see Lather, 2006; St. Pierre, 2006). It is also impor-
tant to note that these wars have not only been between
quantitative and qualitative paradigms but also among
competing paradigms in qualitative inquiry (e.g., Guba
& Lincoln, 1994). Writing in 1989, in a futuristic account
of education research at the turn of the 21st century,
Gage proposed (and hoped for) an armistice of sorts as
“researchers came to a new realization that paradigm
differences do not require paradigm conflict” (p. 7). But
rather than an armistice, paradigm conflicts have seen a
resurgence as both experimental and quasi-experimental
research have been hailed as the “gold” standard in edu-
cational research (see, e.g., National Research Council,
2002). St. Pierre (2006), underscoring the gravity of the
resurgence, has argued—
The stakes are high because the very nature of science and sci-
entific evidence and therefore the nature of knowledge itself
is being contested by scholars and researchers who think and
132 ◆ foundations
work from different epistemological, ontological, and meth-
odological positions as well as by those postmodernists who
challenge the metaphysical project altogether. If one believes
that different theoretical frameworks are grounded in and
structured by different and, perhaps, incommensurable
assumptions about the nature of knowledge, truth, real-
ity, reason, power, science, evidence, and so forth, then one
can see why educators are taking sides in this debate that is
already organizing the limits and possibilities of what we can
think and know and, thus, how we can live in the complex and
tangled world of educational theory, research, policy, and
practice. (pp. 239–240)
Within the complex and tangled world of U.S. math-
ematics education research, this resurgence of paradigm
conflicts is visible within the pages of Foundations of
Success: The Final Report of the National Mathematics
Advisory Panel (NMAP; 2008) and in a special issue of
the Educational Researcher (Kelly, 2008) published in
response. Throughout the pages of both the final report
and the response special issue it is often noted, explic-
itly and implicitly, that supporting certain theoretical
and methodological traditions does not mean complete
abandonment of others. The authoring committee of the
NMAP final report, however, included only experimen-
tal and quasi-experimental research to make eviden-
tial knowledge claims about mathematics teaching and
learning. So as politics took the place of scientific inquiry
(Boaler, 2008), the authoring committee took direct aim
at some epistemological possibilities, and thus theoreti-
cal and methodological possibilities. For instance, they
erased “race” from the conversation on mathematics
teaching and learning altogether (D. B. Martin, 2008).
In the end, as a proliferation of paradigms to think about
and do science in became possible within the decades
of the 1980s and 1990s (Lather, 2006), both education
research in general and mathematics education research
in particular experienced a backlash in the early 2000s
and beyond. The war rages on as the battles over the
nature of knowledge, truth, reality, reason, power, sci-
ence, evidence, and so forth, continue.
Mapping Moments to Paradigms of Inquiry
In an attempt to make sense of the proliferation of
theoretical traditions used in mathematics education
research since the 1970s, Stinson and Bullock (2012)
have identified four distinct yet overlapping and sim­
ultaneously operating shifts or historical moments:
(1) the process–product moment (beginning in the 1970s);
(2) the interpretivist–constructivist moment (beginning
in the 1980s); (3) the social-turn moment (beginning in
the mid-1980s); and (4) the sociopolitical-turn moment
(beginning in the 2000s). These moments of mathemat-
ics education research are not intended to suggest that
movement among the moments occurs in some linear
fashion, arriving at a “best” or “better” place across a
continuum. Rather, the moments are merely arranged in
loose historical chronological order. As a case in point,
Frankenstein (1983) and Skovsmose (1985) began explor-
ing the sociopolitical implications of critical mathematics
education several years before the sociopolitical-turn
moment identified as beginning in the 2000s. In relation
to historical change, Lerman, Xu, and Tsatsaroni (2002)
have cautioned—
To talk about changes over time in a field of research in terms
of changes in the priorities, understandings and interpreta-
tions given by people in positions of power is, at the same time,
to acknowledge a number of other aspects: the structures and
social relations constituting the field as well as, perhaps, the
changing strength of the boundary separating this sub-field
from other research subfields within education research;
changes in the relations between education research and
other fields within the overall arena of research production;
the wider picture of power and control relations which affect
the (relative) autonomy of the intellectual field of knowledge
production, establishing certain forms of social relations
between, on the one hand, the official policy agencies and,
on the other, agencies and agents in the field (in our case
of mathematics education) of knowledge transmission, dis-
semination, use and reproduction. (p. 24)
Mindful of the machinery that sits behind change,
Table 6.1 maps the four moments of mathematics
education research—process–product, interpretivist–
constructivist, social-turn, and sociopolitical-turn—
onto one and, in some cases, two paradigms of inquiry.
Representing an adaptation of a conceptualization offered
by Lather and St. Pierre (see Lather, 2006), four broad par-
adigms are singularly worded by their general intentions:
prediction, understanding, emancipation, and deconstruc-
tion (Stinson & Bullock, 2015)
The purpose in mapping the moments to larger
inquiry paradigms is to illustrate the different theo-
retical and methodological possibilities within each
moment. Although the table does not exhaust all pos-
sibilities, it does provide an expansive list of the kinds of
research that might be undertaken within mathematics
education. For instance, Table 6.1 illustrates that research
in the process–product moment (beginning in the 1970s)
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆ 133

Table 6.1. Mapping Moments of Mathematics Education Research to Paradigms of Inquiry

●  Process–Product Moment (1970s–)→Predict
●  Interpretivist–Constructivist Moment (1980s–)→Understand
● Social-Turn Moment (mid 1980s–)→Understand (albeit, contextualized understanding) or Emancipate (or oscillate
between the two)
●  Sociopolitical-Turn Moment (2000s–)→Emancipate or Deconstruct (or oscillate between the two)

Paradigms of Inquiry
Predict Understand Emancipate Deconstruct
*Positivist *Interpretivist *Critical *Poststructural/
Experimental Social Constructivist <Feminist> Postmodern
Quasi-experimental Radical Constructivist Critical Race Theory> Postcritical

BREAK
Mixed Methods> Sociocultural> Latino/a Critical Race Theory> Postcolonial
Phenomenological Critical Theories of Race> Posthumanist
Ethnographic <Participatory Action Research Post-Freudian
Symbolic Interaction Critical Ethnography <Discourse Analysis

Note. *Indicates the term most commonly used; < or > indicates cross-paradigm movement. The BREAK in the
original Lather and St. Pierre table indicated a shift from the Enlightenment humanist paradigms on the left to
the post-Enlightenment, posthumanist paradigm on the right. Here it indicates a hybrid, in-between space where
the researcher might adopt a critical postmodern theoretical tradition (see Stinson & Bullock, 2012, 2015).
Paradigms of inquiry adapted from table by P. A. Lather and B. St. Pierre, 2005, found in “Paradigm Proliferation
as a Good Thing to Think With: Teaching Research in Education as a Wild Profusion,” by P. A. Lather, 2006,
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(1), p. 37.

is marked by attempts to predict “good” mathematics
teaching by linking mathematics teachers’ classroom prac-
tices (process) to student outcomes (product). Grounded
both theoretically and methodologically in positivist
inferential statistics, cognitive and behavioral theories
derived from experimental psychology and behavior-
ism are the primary theoretical traditions (e.g., Good &
Grouws, 1979). The interpretivist–constructivist moment
(beginning in the 1980s) attempts to understand math-
ematics teaching and learning rather than to predict it;
interpretivist and constructivist theories derived prin-
cipally out of sociology and developmental psychology
are the primary theoretical traditions (e.g., Steffe &
Tzur, 1994; Thompson, 1984). The acknowledgement
that meaning, thinking, and reasoning are products of
social activity in contexts marks the social-turn moment
(beginning in the mid-1980s; see Lerman, 2000b); theo-
ries drawn from disciplines such as cultural and social
psychology, anthropology, and cultural sociology are the
primary theoretical traditions (e.g., Boaler, 1999; Roth &
Radford, 2011; Zevenbergen, 2000). And a shift toward
recognizing knowledge, power, and identity as interwo-
ven and arising from and constituted with and in socio-
cultural and sociopolitical discourses distinguishes the
sociopolitical-turn moment (beginning in the 2000s;
see R. Gutiérrez, 2013); here critical and poststructural
theories are the primary traditions (e.g., Gutstein, 2003;
Walshaw, 2001).
Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers
Given our charge to provide an introduction to theoreti-
cal traditions that are being used to challenge the sta-
tus quo and provide new parts of the conversation and
new ways of understanding things, in this section we
focus on some of the theoretical traditions located in the
emancipate and deconstruct paradigms of inquiry (see
Table 6.1). Specifically, four theoretical traditions that
are located in the sociopolitical-turn moment of math-
ematics education are explored in depth: critical theory,
poststructural theory, critical race theory, and feminist
theory. As each tradition is discussed, we provide histori-
cal context for its development, highlight some of the
key theoretical tools or concepts that are derived from
the tradition, and note examples (or exemplars) of edu-
cation and mathematics education research situated in
the tradition. Although each of the traditions discussed
attempts to “write against Othering” (Fine, 1994, p. 75),
it is important to note that collectively they still privilege,
for the most part, “academic” Western ways of know-
ing and being as opposed to ethnic or indigenous ways
(see K. Martin, 2003; Stanfield, 1994). Nonetheless, as
134 ◆ foundations
Table 6.1 illustrates, there are several theoretical tradi-
tions encompassed within the emancipate or deconstruct
paradigms that we might choose to highlight. We have cho-
sen critical theory and poststructural theory as these could
be considered umbrella traditions under their respective
category. Both of these traditions certainly disrupt the
status quo, albeit in different ways. The choice of critical
race theory and feminist theory was more deliberate.
These theoretical traditions have been slow to make their
way from wider social science research into mathematics
education research.
The Sociopolitical-Turn Moment
The sociopolitical-turn moment, which began chiefly
in the 2000s as previously noted, is characterized as
using theoretical traditions that recognize knowledge,
power, and identity as interwoven and constituted in
and through sociocultural and sociopolitical discourses
(R. Gutiérrez, 2013; also see de Freitas & Nolan, 2008;
Valero & Zevenbergen, 2004). Discourses here, however,
are not mere words that might be heard or read but rather
discursive practices that systematically form the pos-
sibilities (and impossibilities) of knowledge discourses,
which, in turn, produce and reproduce régimes of truth
(Foucault, 1969/1972, 1977/1980). Researchers whose
work might be characterized as being in the sociopolitical-
turn moment adopt a degree of social consciousness and
responsibility in their attempts to both understand and
expose the wider social and political picture of math-
ematics and mathematics teaching and learning (Gates
& Vistro-Yu, 2003; see Jablonka, Wagner, & Walshaw,
2013, for a survey of theories for studying social, politi-
cal, and cultural dimensions of mathematics education).
Acknowledging that no research is agenda free, political
or otherwise, these researchers do not rally around some
common political agenda but rather understand that
education itself is political (cf. Freire, 1985). And today,
few disciplines are as politicized as (school) mathematics
(see Skovsmose & Greer, 2012).
Researchers who work in the sociopolitical-turn
moment pull from a variety of theoretical perspectives
and tools most often located in the emancipate or decon-
struct paradigms of inquiry (see Table 6.1). Although
these paradigms of inquiry operate from different and,
often argued, incommensurable philosophical assump-
tions (see Hill, McLaren, Cole, & Rikowski, 2002), both
paradigms seek to open up the research text (de Freitas
& Nolan, 2008) using theory as a vehicle for exposing
different productive possibilities within mathematics
education (Brown & Walshaw, 2012). In forging these dif-
ferent frontiers, researchers aim to open up “the fictions,
fantasies and plays of power inherent in mathematics
education” (Walkerdine, 2004, p. viii) as they challenge
the taken-for-granted assumptions that underlie much
of mainstream mathematics education research, most
often located in the predict or understand paradigms.
As we focus on theoretical traditions located in the
emancipate or deconstruct paradigms, it is important
to reiterate two points. First, we use the term different
rather than new to remind readers that the theoretical
traditions discussed are neither new to the social sci-
ences generally nor to education social science specifi-
cally. They are, however, somewhat new to the research
domain of mathematics education. Second, we are not
suggesting that the theoretical traditions that we high-
light here lead to a better or best way of conducting math-
ematics education research. They do, however, disrupt
the status quo by providing different (and uncertain) pos-
sibilities for producing different knowledge and produc-
ing knowledge differently (St. Pierre, 1997). Moreover, it
is also important to note that each paradigm of inquiry
comes with its own set of (subjective) assumptions of a
philosophical type regarding truth, certainty, and logical
consistency. As Valero (2004) has explained:
What we choose to research and the ways in which we carry
out that research are constructions determined, among other
factors, by who we are and how we choose to engage in aca-
demic inquiry. . . . There are considerable ‘subjective’ and
‘ideological’ grounds—rather than ‘objective’ reasons—to
engage in particular ways of conceiving and conducting
research in mathematics education. (p. 6)
Therefore, as we discuss different theoretical tradi-
tions located under the emancipate or deconstruct para-
digms, our aim is not to “tell others what they must do”
but rather “to shake up habitual ways of working and
thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, [and]
to re-evaluate rules and institutions,” what Foucault
(1984/1996) aptly characterized as “the role of an intel-
lectual” (pp. 462–463).
Moreover, although theory and methodology are
inextricably linked (Crotty, 1998; LeCompte, Preissle,
& Tesch, 1993), given the limitation of space, we discuss
methodological possibilities only tangentially. Suffice it
to say, however, that as the theories highlighted here are
disruptive to the status quo so too are the methodologies,
as traditional methods of data collection, analysis, and
representation are destabilized and opened up to differ-
ent possibilities (e.g., de Freitas & Nolan, 2008; Valero &
Zevenbergen, 2004). To illustrate these different possi-
bilities, we provide detailed sketches of four studies rep-
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
resentative of the highlighted traditions pulled from the
pages of the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education
(JRME). (For a full discussion on qualitative methodolo-
gies see de Freitas, Lerman, and Parks, 2017, this volume.)
Critical Theory
There are several theoretical traditions that fall under
the emancipate paradigm of inquiry, with critical theory
being the most commonly used term. It also is the tradi-
tion discussed here that is most likely familiar to math-
ematics education researchers. Applications of critical
theory to the disciplines of mathematics and mathemat-
ics education began to appear in the research literature
in the 1980s, in the early work of Frankenstein (1983)
and Skovsmose (1985), and are increasingly visible today
(see A. Powell, 2012, for a brief history of the develop-
ment of critical mathematics). As Frankenstein (2005),
Skovsmose (2005, 2009), and others (see Alrø, Ravn, &
Valero, 2010) continue to refine theoretically just what
critical mathematics might mean, others have begun to
experiment with curricula and pedagogical strategies for
teaching critical mathematics or, what has become the
more commonly used phrase, teaching mathematics for
social justice (e.g., Gutstein 2003, 2006). This social jus-
tice mathematics movement, if you will, has motivated a
number of edited volumes (e.g., Burton, 2003; Gutstein &
Peterson, 2013; Wager & Stinson, 2012) and special issues
of mathematics education journals (e.g., Ernest, 2007;
Gates & Jorgensen, 2009; Sriraman, 2009) that explore,
both in theory and in practice, the possibilities of teach-
ing and learning mathematics for social change, which
has its genesis in critical theory.
The origin of critical theory is most often associated
with the Institute for Social Research Frankfurt School
(circa 1920), which holds a Marxist theoretical perspec-
tive: to critique and subvert domination in all its forms
(Bottomore, 2001; see Crotty, 1998, for a history of the
development of critical theory and inquiry). Derived
from the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, psychology,
and others, as these critiques evolved they became known
collectively as critical theory sometime in the mid-20th
century. And although the Frankfurt School and the for-
mative works of Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) are
foundational in its development, it is important to keep
in mind that critical theory is neither coextensive with
either of these or with both of them together (Crotty,
1998). That is to say, critical theory has extended beyond
its initial critiques of capitalism, positivism, material-
ism, determinism, and so forth, as it pushes against the
idea of some unifying approach to social and political
critique (see Bronner, 2011).
135
The numerous philosophical, theoretical, and meth-
odological approaches to sociopolitical critique found in
critical theory are as varied as the scholars and disciplines
that have contributed to its development. Nevertheless,
in the most general sense, critical theory maintains socio-
political critiques on social practices and ideology that
mask “systematically distorted accounts of reality which
attempt to conceal and legitimate asymmetrical power
relations” (Bottomore, 2001, p. 209). Critical theorists
contend that as marginalized individuals and groups
become critically aware of their “true” situation, inter-
vene in its reality, and thus take charge of their destiny,
they will exercise their human right to participate with
a critical consciousness in the sociocultural and socio-
political transformation of their society (Crotty, 1998).
Bronner (2011), in providing a definition of sorts of critical
theory, wrote—
Critical theory refuses to identify freedom with any institu-
tional arrangement or fixed system of thought. It questions
the hidden assumptions and purposes of competing theories
and existing forms of practice. . . . Critical theory insists that
thought must respond to the new problems and the new pos-
sibilities for liberation that arise from changing historical
circumstances. Interdisciplinary and uniquely experimen-
tal in character, deeply skeptical of tradition and all absolute
claims, critical theory . . . [is] concerned not merely with how
things [are] but how they might be and should be. (pp. 1–2)
In the context of education, critical theory in the
mid-20th century and beyond has provided different
theoretical tools of inquiry to examine schools and their
functions and to explore and expose the persistent ineq-
uities and injustices too often found in schools. Early
influential studies in the context of U.S. education include
critical inquires that exposed the function of capital-
ism in producing and reproducing inequities in schools
(Bowles, 1971); that uncovered the hidden curriculum
in creating socioeconomically stratified opportunities
to learn (Anyon, 1980); and that revealed the resistance
to equitable school reform through the policies of “aca-
demic” tracking (Oakes, 1985). Recent critical inquires
often include analyses of market influences within the
neoconservative and neoliberal agenda around the pri-
vatization of public education (e.g., Anyon, 2005; Apple,
2014; Lipman, 2011). Critical inquiries of the past and
present act as catalysts to bring about an awakening of
false consciousness and an awareness of social injustices,
which, in turn, motivate self-empowerment and social
transformation—two fundamental concepts of critical
theory. It is important to note that early critical inquiries
136 ◆ foundations
often stayed true to the Marxist critique on social class.
The philosophical and theoretical foundations of critical
theory, however, have been expanded to include explicit
inquiries on the social inequities and injustices of race
(e.g., Dixson & Rousseau, 2006) and gender (e.g., Hesse-
Biber & Yaiser, 2004), with many critical inquires exam-
ining the intersectionality of race, class, and gender as
well as sexual orientation, dis/ability, religion, and so on
(e.g., Rosenblum & Travis, 2008).
On the whole, critical inquiry “keeps the spotlight
on power relations within society so as to expose the
forces of hegemony and injustice” (Crotty, 1998, p. 157).
Hegemony constructs people as objects—those who are
acted upon, rather than subjects, those who act—who
become so entrenched in their own oppressive condition
that they do not realize their own subjugation or com-
plicity in the perpetuation of unjust social and economic
systems (Freire, 1970/2000). (See Greer & Mukhopadhyay,
2012, for a discussion on the hegemony of mathematics.)
Critical inquiry creates an ethical burden of responsibility
for the researcher because with every action taken the
context changes and the researcher must critique her or
his assumptions again and again (Crotty, 1998). Critical
theorists therefore call for all efforts to produce and dis-
seminate knowledge to be accompanied by an investiga-
tion of not only its relation to ideology and power but also
the subjectivities of its producers (Leistyna & Woodrum,
1996). Kincheloe, McLaren, and Steinberg (2011) have
outlined (cautiously) seven basic assumptions that a
critical researcher often holds:
• All thought is fundamentally mediated by power rela-
tions that are social and historically constituted;
• Facts can never be isolated from the domain of values
or removed from some form of ideological inscription;
• The relationship between concept and object and between
signifier and signified is never stable or fixed and is often
mediated by the social relations of capitalist production
and consumption;
• Language is central to the formation of subjectivity (con-
scious and unconscious awareness);
• Certain groups in any society and particular societies are
privileged over others and, although the reasons for this
privileging may vary widely, the oppression that charac-
terizes contemporary societies is most forcefully repro-
duced when subordinates accept their social status as
natural, necessary, or inevitable;
• Oppression has many faces and that focusing on only one
form of oppression at the expense of others (e.g., class
oppression versus racism) often eludes the interconnec-
tions among them; and finally
• Mainstream research practices are generally, although
most often unwittingly, implicated in the reproduction
of systems of class, race, and gender oppression. (p. 164)
But beyond critical inquiries into the persistent injus-
tices epidemically embedded in the structures of schools,
the significant theoretical contribution of critical theory
to education has been the ongoing development of criti-
cal pedagogy (e.g., hooks, 2003; Leistyna, Woodrum, &
Sherblom, 1996; McLaren & Kincheloe, 2007). Rooted in
a democratic project of justice and freedom, critical peda-
gogy advances theories and practices that push teachers
and students alike to critically examine the intercon-
necting relationships among ideology, power, and culture
and the social structures and discursive practices that
produce and reproduce knowledge (Leistyna & Woodrum,
1996). Critical pedagogy, however, is not a one-size-fits-all
pedagogy, but rather a humanizing pedagogy that values
and builds on students’ and teachers’ individual and col-
lective background knowledge, culture, and lived experi-
ences (Bartolomé, 1994).
The tenets of critical pedagogy are found, in vary-
ing degrees, “in a historical and continuing legacy of
educators—from the early twentieth century (e.g., John
Dewey and W. E. B Du Bois) to the twenty-first century
(e.g., Michael Apple and bell hooks)—who have labored to
advance democratic ideals within education” (Stinson &
Wager, 2012, p. 8). As a pedagogical movement, however,
critical pedagogy is argued to have its beginnings in the
scholarship of the Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire,
the “inaugural philosopher of critical pedagogy” (McLaren
1999, p. 49). Consistent with critical theory, the concepts
of self-empowerment and social transformation are recur-
ring themes found throughout Freire’s prolific writings
(e.g., 1970/2000, 1985, 2005). Vehemently opposed to
the “‘banking’ concept of education” (1970/2000, p. 72)
where students are passive, empty depositories awaiting
the teacher’s deposits, Freire’s pedagogical theories and
practices promote a problem-posing pedagogy where
teachers and students “develop their power to perceive
critically the way they exist in the world with which and in
which they find themselves” (1970/2000, p. 83, emphasis
in original). Here the teacher-of-the-students and the
students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a more human
possibility emerges: teacher-students with students-
teachers. In short, critical pedagogy advances a critical,
dialectical reading of the word and world so as to write
the word to rewrite the world (Freire, 1970/2000). (See
Freire, 1997, for critiques of critical pedagogy from leading
education scholars and his responses to those critiques.)
Within mathematics education, critical theory and
critical pedagogy have been chiefly manifested in the
ongoing development of critical mathematics and teach-
ing mathematics for social justice (TMfSJ; see Wager &
Stinson, 2012, for candid discussions about the origins
and ongoing development of critical and social justice
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
mathematics from some of the leading critical mathemat-
ics educators). Critical mathematics recognizes students
(and teachers) as members of a society rife with hege-
monic power as it builds mathematics in and around
students’ cultural identities in such a way that doing
mathematics necessarily takes up social and political
issues (Gutiérrez, 2002). As a tool for sociopolitical cri-
tique, critical mathematics is characterized as providing
an investigation into the sources of knowledge, identify-
ing social problems and plausible solutions, and reacting
to social injustices (Skovsmose, 1994). Skovsmose and
Nielsen (1996) have described critical mathematics in
terms of the following “concerns”:
• Citizenship identifies schooling as including the prepa-
ration of students to be an active part of a political life.
• Mathematics may serve as a tool for identifying and
analysing critical features of society, which may be glob-
al as well as having to do with the local environment of
students.
• The students’ interest emphasises that the main focus of
education cannot be the transformation of (pure) knowl-
edge; instead educational practice must be understood
in terms of acting persons.
• Culture and conflicts raise basic questions about dis-
crimination. Does mathematics education reproduce
inequalities which might be established by factors out-
side education but, nevertheless, are reinforced by edu-
cational practice?
• Mathematics itself might be problematic because of the
future of mathematics as part of modern technology,
which no longer can be reviewed with optimism. Math-
ematics is not only a tool for critique but also an object
of critique.
• Critical mathematics education concentrates on life
in the classroom to the extent that the communica-
tion between teachers and students can reflect power
relations. (p. 1261; also see Frankenstein, Volmink, and
Powell, as cited in A. B. Powell, 2012, pp. 26–27)
These concerns of what mathematics is or could be
or should be are clearly reflected in the previously noted
growing body of research on TMfSJ. For example, Gutstein
(2006), in his book Reading and Writing the World With
Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice, provided
an accessible model of what it might mean to teach math-
ematics for social justice. According to Gutstein, TMfSJ
has two dialectically related sets of pedagogical goals:
one set focuses on social justice and the other set focuses
on mathematics
Building from the scholarship of Freire (and others),
Gutstein’s (2006) social justice pedagogical goals are read-
ing the world with mathematics, writing the world with
137
mathematics, and developing positive cultural and social
identities. Reading the world with mathematics uses math-
ematics to understand power relations; resource inequi-
ties; disparate opportunities; and explicit and implicit
discrimination based on race, class, gender, language, and
other differences (Gutstein, 2003). Writing the world with
mathematics uses mathematics to rewrite the world—
that is, to change the world in and through mathematics
(Gutstein, 2006). Developing positive cultural and social
identities grounds mathematics instruction in the stu-
dents’ languages, cultures, and communities while provid-
ing them with the mathematical knowledge needed to sur-
vive and thrive in the dominant culture (Gutstein, 2006).
Gutstein’s (2006) mathematics pedagogical goals are
reading the mathematical word, succeeding academi-
cally in the traditional sense, and changing students’
and teachers’ orientation to mathematics. Reading the
mathematical word develops students and teachers math-
ematical power: defined as deducing mathematical gen-
eralizations, constructing creative solution methods to
nonroutine problems, and perceiving mathematics as a
tool for sociopolitical critique (Gutstein, 2003). Succeed-
ing academically in the traditional sense means students
achieve on standardized tests, graduate from high school,
succeed in college, have access to advanced mathematics
courses, and pursue mathematics-related careers, if they
so choose. Succeeding academically, however, is coupled
with challenging the sociopolitical structures (including
schools and mathematics classrooms) that often act as
obstacles to success for different groups of people (e.g.,
students of color, women, and working-class students;
Gutstein, 2006). Changing students’ and teachers’ orien-
tation to mathematics means to understand mathematics
not as a series of disconnected, rote rules to memorize
and regurgitate, but rather as a powerful and relevant ana-
lytical tool for understanding complicated, “real-world”
phenomena (Gutstein, 2006). In short, TMfSJ establishes
mathematics as an essential tool for understanding and
changing the world; connects mathematics with students’
cultural and community histories; and assists students
and teachers in understanding the power of an active,
democratic citizenry, while, in turn, motivating students
to engage in learning significant mathematics (Gutstein &
Peterson, 2013).
In his JRME article “Teaching and Learning Math-
ematics for Social Justice in an Urban, Latino School,”
Gutstein (2003) provided an example of how critical ped-
agogy can be put to work both as a method of instruction
and as a theory for research. Reporting on a 2-year study
in which he was both teacher and researcher, Gutstein
and his students explored just what TMfSJ might look
like in the context of a Latino/a, urban middle school.
138 ◆ foundations
During the 2 years, Gutstein was the seventh- and eighth-
grade mathematics teacher of 24 Latino/a students from
immigrant, working class families (out of a total of 28 stu-
dents). As the classroom teacher, Gutstein integrated 17
real-world, social justice projects into standards-based
mathematics curricula. His aim was to assist students
in developing a sociopolitical consciousness, a sense of
agency, and positive social and cultural identities as they
collectively engaged in learning rigorous mathematics.
In general, both the research project and the instruc-
tional practices were grounded in the Freirian dialect of
reading the word and world so to write and rewrite the
world (Freire, 1970/2000).
Using a form of participative inquiry (see Reason, 1994),
Gutstein (2003) methodologically positioned himself as
an active and subjective insider rather than as a passive
and “objective” outsider. He collected data from several
sources, such as participant observations, student and
teacher/researcher journals, open-ended surveys, student
demographic data (i.e., race, ethnic, and class data as well
as standardized test scores), student work from 16 of the
17 social justice projects, and informal conversations with
students (both inside and outside of school).
Data analysis included traditional qualitative meth-
ods of data triangulation as Gutstein (2003) engaged in
the iterative process of reading and rereading and cod-
ing and recoding multiple data sources in search of con-
nections and themes. Different in his analysis, however,
was the continued recycling back to and through con-
cepts from critical theory such as self-empowerment and
social transformation. Data representation comprised
extended quotations and reflections from the students
(and Gutstein himself), as well as extended excerpts from
the students’ individual and group work on the social
justice projects. These data representations illustrated
how the students advanced over time as they began to
read their world through mathematics, to develop their
mathematical power, and to change their orientations
toward mathematics. The students also showed growth
and achievement on conventional methods of assessments
(e.g., standardized tests). Gutstein concluded that the
primary condition that contributed to his students’ (and
his) growth through the 2 years was how he and his stu-
dents “cocreated a classroom environment in which they
discussed meaningful and important issues of justice and
equity” (p. 67) in and through mathematics.
There are other critical accounts of exploring teach-
ing and learning mathematics for social justice in the
classroom that highlight the challenges, promises, and
tensions of implementing critical mathematics curri-
cula and instructional practices (e.g., Brantlinger, 2013;
Gregson, 2013), including accounts provided by class-
room teachers (e.g., Peterson, 2012; G. C. Powell, 2012;
Stocker, 2012; Wamsted, 2012). But for the most part,
recent TMfSJ literature has focused on how preservice
and in-service teachers might learn to teach mathe-
matics for social justice (e.g., Bartell, 2013; Esmonde &
Caswell, 2010; Gonzales, 2009; Leonard, Brooks, Barnes-
Johnson, & Berry, 2010; Stinson, Bidwell, & Powell,
2012; also see the two volume special issue of the Journal
of Mathematics Teacher Education, edited by Gates and
Jorgensen, 2009).
Other growing bodies of mathematics education
research that draw heavily on the tenets of critical
theory include ethnomathematics (e.g., D’Ambrosio,
1985; Powell & Frankenstein, 1997) and culturally spe-
cific and responsive mathematics pedagogy (e.g., Greer
et al., 2009; Leonard, 2008). These traditions, similar to
critical and social justice mathematics, aim toward an
empowering mathematics education that expands access
to and opportunities for learning meaningful mathe-
matics for all students. And here it is important to note
that empowering mathematics is understood as having
three domains: mathematical, social, and epistemologi-
cal (Ernest, 2002). Mathematical empowerment relates
to gaining proficiency in the language, skills, and prac-
tices of using (school) mathematics; social empowerment
relates to using mathematics as a tool for sociopolitical
critique; and epistemological empowerment relates to
acquiring a sense of ownership over the creation and vali-
dation of mathematical knowledge (Ernest, 2002). In the
end, critical inquiries in mathematics education research
aim toward transforming mathematics from an instru-
ment too often used for social stratification into an instru-
ment for self-empowerment for all (Stinson, 2004).
Poststructural Theory
Poststructuralism is an intellectual movement informing
a cluster of theoretical positions ranging from phenome-
nology to deconstruction. Emerging around 50 years ago,
its overall objective is to trouble traditional understand-
ings (see Seidman, 1994). Located in Table 6.1 under
the paradigm of inquiry with the expressed purpose of
deconstruction, poststructural (or postmodern) theory
challenges our “safe” and “true” understandings, offer-
ing critical interrogations of familiar ideas of knowing,
description, and the rational subject (see Agger, 1991, for
a discussion on the differences between poststructural and
post­modern). Through poststructural interrogations, we
become exposed to the limits of knowing and become skep-
tical about the possibility of absolute truth and meaning.
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
Poststructural theory became accessible to educa-
tion in the 1980s with the publication of the book Chang-
ing the Subject (Henriques, Holloway, Urwin, Venn, &
Walkerdine, 1984). The stated aim of this book was to pry
apart meanings and assumptions “in order to see them
as historically specific products rather than timeless
and incontrovertible facts” (Henriques et al., 1984, p. 2).
Although Walkerdine had contributed a chapter to this
book, her major contribution to mathematics education
appeared with her single-authored volume The Mastery of
Reason: Cognitive Development and the Production of Ratio-
nality (Walkerdine, 1988). In this book, working with the
ideas of a number of poststructuralists, she developed a
different approach to language and thinking within ele-
mentary school mathematics. In particular, she tackled
the issues of context and transfer, later explaining that
the problem of grafting context “onto a single model of
cognitive development . . . lay within the theory itself”
(Walkerdine, 1990a, p. 51).
Tracking the movement of poststructural thought
within mathematics education also leads to Popkewitz
(1988). In the same year that Walkerdine published her
book, Popkewitz drew on poststructural theory to analyze
knowledge, power, and curriculum. When in 1997 Brown
published his book Mathematics Education and Language:
Interpreting Hermeneutics and Post-Structuralism (Brown,
1997), the uptake of poststructural ideas was beginning
to become more widespread (e.g., Black, Mendick, &
Solomon, 2009; Brown, 2008; Brown & McNamara, 2011;
de Freitas & Nolan, 2008; Fitzsimmons, 2002; R. Gutiér-
rez, 2008b; Mendick, 2006; Popkewitz, 2004; Stinson,
2008, 2013b; Walshaw, 2001, 2004, 2010). Journals began
to accept poststructural analyses, and as a result, different
kinds of analyses began to appear. For example, a special
issue of JRME published in 2013, with an expressed focus
on identity and power, and publications within the Journal
of Urban Mathematics Education have both included a num-
ber of articles with poststructural sensibilities. Confer-
ences (e.g., ICMI, PME, MES [Mathematics Education and
Society]) became receptive to poststructural papers, and
many of the papers presented at the Mathematics Educa-
tion and Contemporary Theory conference held in 2011,
2013, and 2016 were informed by poststructural theory.
Poststructural theory, in many ways, developed in the
space created within Western academia as a result of pro-
found political and social crises of legitimation following
two global wars. As a critical and self-reflective theory,
poststructuralism developed from the work of a group
of mainly French thinkers (e.g., Derrida, 1976; Foucault,
1969/1972; Kristeva, 1984; Lyotard, 1979/1984), who
aspired to a new way of seeing and working. Irrespective
139
of specific approach, poststructuralists maintain that
the “grand narratives” of Western history have broken
down. Each work is a reaction to structuralism, claiming
that the necessary relations in language between “word”
and “thing” that structuralists seek to establish do not
account for the historical and contingent nature of all
linguistic expression.
Poststructural approaches problematize long-held
understandings. In addition to troubling the notion that
language is transparent, they trouble the idea that reality
is “out there” waiting to be observed, regardless of who is
observing. They trouble the understanding that meaning
is absolute. They also trouble the idea that knowing is an
outcome of human consciousness and interpretation and
that individuals are autonomous and stable with agency
to choose what kind of individual they might become.
The alternatives poststructuralists provide are built
around a number of key tenets: language is fragile and
problematic and constitutes rather than reflects an already
given reality. Because reality, like meaning, is in a con-
stant process of construction, no one has access to an
independent reality. Individuals are decentered and are
constantly in process. Knowers are not interchangeable
spectators, abstracted from the particularities of their
circumstances. More specifically, there is no universal,
homogenous, and “essential” human nature that allows
one to put oneself in another’s place and know his or her
circumstances and interests in exactly the same way as
she or he would know them. Because there is no “view
from nowhere” (Haraway, 1988), representation can no
longer be considered a politically neutral and theoreti-
cally innocent activity.
These key tenets do not promise total vision. They do
not enable researchers to produce the “truth” about the
work of teachers, students, educators, and policy mak-
ers involved with mathematics education. Rather, they
make it possible for researchers to investigate, for exam-
ple, whose meanings and values are legitimated and
whose knowledge and interests are privileged, margin-
alized, or silenced. They also make it possible to inves-
tigate how investments are sustained. They provide the
tools to explore how practices of subjectivity are lived
by individuals in relation to familiar and repetitive
practices, as well as in relation to contradictory math-
ematics processes and structures. They do not deny the
existence of the subject but open up questions about its
origin and explore the ways in which individual agency is
an effect of the ways in which the subject is constituted.
These explorations are able to identify the changing
practices and processes that produce different kinds of
subjects over time.
140 ◆ foundations
To be more specific, analyses drawing on poststruc-
tural tools are focused on understanding, explaining, and
analyzing the practices and processes within mathemat-
ics education. Researchers unpack the ways in which
the classroom, the school, and policies create specific
conditions and forms of control that shape students’ and
teachers’ knowledge and sense of themselves as math-
ematics students and teachers, respectively. The analy-
ses chart teaching and learning and the way in which
identities and proficiencies evolve: tracking reflections;
investigating everyday classroom planning, activities,
and tools; analyzing discussions with principals, math-
ematics teachers, students, and educators; and mapping
out the regulating and normalizing effects of practices,
processes, and structures. In the process of deconstruct-
ing taken-for-granted understandings, poststructural
analyses reveal how identities are constructed within
discourses, demonstrating how everyday decisions are
shaped by dispositions and tendencies formed through
prior events. They also provide insights about the way in
which language produces meanings and how it positions
people in relations of power.
Discursive approaches, situated under the banner
of poststructural theory, offer tools and an alternative
language for looking at, interpreting, and explaining
practice and process within mathematics education.
Researchers using these approaches typically draw on
the work of Foucault (e.g., 1969/1972, 1981), for whom
discourse is a central concept. In Foucault’s under-
standing, discourses map out for teachers, students, and
others, ways of living in the classroom and ways of being
within other institutions of mathematics education. They
produce particular kinds of students and teachers, as
effects of discursive relations, by systematically consti-
tuting specific versions of the social and natural worlds
for them, all the while obscuring other possibilities from
their vision. Foucault (1981) argued that discourses are
“not about objects; they do not identify objects, they
constitute them and in the practice of doing so conceal
their own invention” (p. 49). That is to say, discourses are
not simply a way of organizing what people say and do;
they are also ways of organizing actual people and their
systems. As a consequence, “truths” about mathematics
education emerge through the operation of discursive
systems.
Understood in the Foucauldian meaning, the notion of
discourse compels poststructural researchers who have
an interest in identity to shift the focus from examining
the “nature” of mathematical identity to examining how
identity is discursively created. Such an examination has
been provided by de Freitas (2010). Through her inves-
tigation of the discourses operating in two mathematics
classrooms, de Freitas showed how classroom discourses
shaped the production of particular mathematical identi-
ties in senior high school students. In analyzing teacher
talk through the narrative sequences presented in a series
of lessons of the two classroom teachers, she showed
how the students’ identities were formed, differentially,
within the two classrooms. More important, de Freitas
unearthed the ways in which the teachers’ talk provided
students with differential access to mathematics as well
as differential access to mathematical thinking.
Differences that are created through discourses have
garnered the attention of a number of poststructural
researchers (e.g., Bibby, 2009; Hardy, 2009; Lerman,
2009). In explaining how official documents name differ-
ence and how by doing so influence the development of
mathematical identities, Mendick, Moreau, and Epstein
(2009) argued: “A position of mathematically able con-
fers an identity as different and special. This has con-
sequences for mathematics and society: it excludes
many people from mathematics and disproportionately
excludes particular groups” (p. 72). Hardy (2009) has also
drawn attention to the way in which “difference” is estab-
lished. Reporting on her study of elementary preservice
teachers’ confidence in mathematics, Hardy argued: “It
is the very conceptualising of primary teachers’ profes-
sional knowledge of maths which, in its articulation, gen-
erates and condemns teachers to having faulty knowl-
edge. That is, it is the attempt at better description . . .
that produces the problem” (p. 195).
Policy directives, as Hanley (2010) has noted, are
designed to initiate thinking, speaking, and acting in the
terms offered within the official document. Similarly,
Morgan (2009) has argued that “the concepts, values,
and positions of the official discourse . . . have particular
force because of the roles they play in regulating school
practices and, hence, the extent to which they are inte-
grated into the actual experience of teachers and stu-
dents” (p. 105). Brown and McNamara (2011), along with
Popkewitz (2004), have shown that policy announce-
ments in relation to what teachers and students do and
say in mathematics classrooms are part of a regulatory
apparatus that governs teaching and the “moral develop-
ment and liberation of the individual” (Popkewitz, 2004,
p. 13). This regulatory governing results in teachers
coming to view teaching only in terms of the practices
and language promoted within curriculum documents
(Brown & McNamara). In effect, the practice of teach-
ing, and the teachers and students involved in that
practice, are entangled within régimes of truth, power,
discourses, meanings, and significations that “have
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
already been confirmed in the a priori world of school-
ing and mathematics education research” (Popkewitz,
2004, p. 21).
In poststructural understanding, power invades all
social structures and “reaches into the very grain of indi-
viduals” (Foucault, 1977/1980, p. 39). With Foucault’s
work it became possible to construct plausible explana-
tions of how power operates even at the mundane and
routine pedagogical levels of everyday classroom life.
Power seeps through all classrooms. Importantly, a class-
room environment that provides equitable and inclusive
pedagogical arrangements is not exempt. As a number of
researchers (e.g., Knijnik, 2012; Mendick, 2006; Walshaw,
2001) have shown, power is ever-present through the
classroom social structure, systematically creating ways
of being and thinking in relation to mathematics. Walshaw
(2013) has claimed—
In the classroom strands of power entangle everyone, gov-
erning, regulating, and disciplining teachers as well as
students. Power does its work through the classroom’s tra-
ditions; through its material, discursive, and technological
forms; through its mathematical enactments; and through
its discourses that relate to categories of class, gender, eth-
nicity, and other social determinations. (p. 103)
Post-Freudian theory or, more generally, psycho­
analysis is also situated under the banner of post­
structuralism; it presents complex and well-developed
theories of subjectivity, enabling an analysis of the part
that power plays as the self is enacted into being. In
mathematics education psychoanalytic work is heavily
influenced by the work of Lacan (e.g., 1977) and Žižek’s
(e.g., 1998) development of that work. For Žižek, “there
are no identities as such. There are just identifications with
particular ways of making sense of the world that shape
that person’s sense of his self and his actions” (Brown &
McNamara, 2011, p. 26, emphasis in original). The identi-
ties we have of ourselves are, in a very real sense, “com-
promised,” made in and through the activities, desires,
interests, and investments of others. Compromises, con-
flict, and division are difficult to theorize within tradi-
tional frameworks, but with psychoanalytic theory tools
are provided for investigating such experiences.
Psychoanalytic theory provides a language that is
useful for revealing how identities develop through dis-
courses and networks of power that constantly shift and
change as alliances are formed and reformed. Hanley
(2010) has demonstrated that identities emerge, within
given contexts and time, as fragmented rather than stable.
As a result, the individual comes to identify with mul-
141
tiple positionings and self-understandings, relevant to
context and time. This psychoanalytic understanding
is crucial, for example, for explaining how teachers and
students (among others) negotiate their way through
the rough seas of multiple discourses relating to what a
“good” teacher or “good” student looks like.
Investment in one discourse rather than another is
explained in psychoanalytic theory through the notion
of affect. Affect pertaining to a classroom student or
teacher, in psychoanalysis, is not a factor or measure
of personality. Rather, it is a pervasive and constitutive
quality of classroom life. Elaborating further, Walshaw
and Brown (2012) have noted that typically within math-
ematics education, affect is an add-on, and affect and
thinking are opposed to each other: the cognitive and the
emotional are on vastly different planes. On the other
hand, in the psychoanalytic assessment the cognitive and
the affective are two sides of the same coin and cannot
be conceived of as mutually exclusive. On the basis of
their investigation into two mathematics classrooms and
drawing on theoretical tools developed from Spinoza’s
(2000) work, Walshaw and Brown have argued that think-
ing and affect are not separate. Cognition cannot stand
alone without affect precisely because affect initiates
the purpose of thinking. Because it is not possible, in the
final analysis, to separate one from the other, it follows
that affective dimensions cannot simply be grafted onto
a model of human cognition, predicated on a unitary and
fixed human subject.
Psychoanalytic tools are particularly sharp instru-
ments for exploring uncertainty within the mathemat-
ics classroom. Appelbaum (2008), for example, has used
psychoanalytic tools to “shift our focus away from either
the position of the teacher or the learner” (p. 52). He has
maintained that neither student-centered nor teacher-
centered pedagogies fully capture the teacher–student
relation. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Appelbaum
has proposed a move “toward the relationality of the
teaching/learning encounter” (p. 52). This new expres-
sion of teaching is no longer focused on the teacher or
the student but on the relation between them. In this
understanding, pedagogy crystallizes within the space
and relation between the teacher and the student. As
Appelbaum explained, “mathematical ideas, objects, strat-
egies, interpretations, and so on, become the objects of the
students’ and teacher’s intentionality and the basis for
their ability to communicate and understand each other,
to be together in the world” (p. 57; emphasis in ori­ginal).
A psychoanalysis exploring the relationality of the
teaching/learning encounter would, of necessity, need
to explore the mathematical ideas, objects, strategies,
142 ◆ foundations
interpretations, and so on, that are shared between teacher
and student.
In his JRME article “Negotiating the ‘White Male Math
Myth’: African American Male Students and Success
in School Mathematics,” Stinson (2013b) described an
example of how poststructural approaches and tools
can reconstitute “a problem” (Du Bois, 1903/1989, p. 2).
Drawing on poststructural reinscriptions of the concepts
discourse, identity, and power, Stinson illustrated how
four academically and mathematically successful African
American male students accommodated, reconfigured,
or resisted (i.e., negotiated) the “White male math myth”
discourse. The aim of the project was twofold: (1) to decon-
struct (cf. Derrida, 1976) the discourses and discursive
practices that most often constitute African American
male students as academically and mathematically defi-
cient and (2) to demonstrate that discursive formations
(cf. Foucault, 1969/1972) such as the White male math
myth are opened to reconfiguration because they are
produced and reproduced culturally and historically
with and in discursive practices and power relations
(cf. Foucault, 1969/72).
Methodologically, Stinson (2013b) chose to do research
with rather than on the study’s participants. Participative
inquiry (see Reason, 1994), with its emphasis on test-
ing theory, experiential knowing, and engagement with
others, aligned with this goal as well as with the post-
structural underpinnings of the project. Data collection
included a combination of written artifacts and inter-
views. Each participant completed a demographic and
schooling survey, wrote a brief autobiography and math-
ematics autobiography, and completed four interviews.
Prior to the second and third interviews, the participants
were asked to read, reflect on, and respond to three manu-
scripts (six manuscripts in total) that discussed historical
and current theories regarding African American chil-
dren’s schooling experiences (e.g., the theory of “acting
White”; Fordham, 2008; Fordham & Ogbu, 1986).
The purpose of having the participants read literature
prior to the interviews was to bring the participants into
the project, blurring (or prying apart) the researcher/
participant binary. This blurring of the binary motivated
a different, more active engagement from the partici-
pants as they began to theorize how discourses in exis-
tent literature constituted African American male youth
in conjunction with their own lived experiences. A post-
structural extension of D. B. Martin’s (2000) multilevel
framework of socialization and identity among African
American youth was used throughout data analysis. This
extension depicted the participants’ robust mathemat-
ics identities as multiplicitous and fragmented as they
negotiated broad sociocultural discourses and discursive
practices that too often constituted them as academically
deficient and socially dangerous. Data representation
incorporated participants’ textual and interview data
interwoven with poststructural reinscriptions of con-
cepts; here theory was being brought to the field rather
than waiting for it to “emerge” (Stinson, 2009). Consis-
tent with a poststructural sensibility, Stinson (2013b)
concluded not with “answers” but rather with disruptive
questions intended to refute closure and encourage an
awareness of and tolerance toward difference, ambigu-
ity, and conflict in regards to the mathematical identities
of African American male students.
Overall, analyses by mathematics education research-
ers who draw on poststructural theory resist closure as
they invite the “unknown,” the “fluid,” and the “becom-
ing.” Paying attention to these aspects allows research-
ers to explore areas of interest that are not commonplace
within the field of mathematics education. In doing so,
poststructuralists open up the possibility of more inclu-
sive, equitable, and transformative forms of research
practice. To that end, poststructural theory aligns with
the goals of transformation characteristic of critical the-
ory. Stinson and Bullock (2012) have proposed creating a
hybrid of the two theoretical positions that would “offer
a praxis of uncertainty for reconceptualizing and con-
ducting mathematics education research” (p. 41). The
praxis would, in Radford’s (2012) words, represent a space
“where we come to recognize ourselves as historical and
political beings and where we critically labor together to
make this collective space better for all” (p. 111).
Critical Race Theory
Over three decades ago, a number of mathematics edu-
cation researchers in the United States began to link
the goals of equity and reform in mathematics teaching
and learning to issues of “race” (e.g., W. Matthews, 1984;
Reyes & Stanic, 1988; Secada, 1992; Tate, 1994). Race
and racism, however, continue to be undertheorized and
underresearched in mathematics education (Lubienski
& Bowen, 2000; Parks & Schmeichel, 2012; D. B. Martin,
2009c; Stinson, 2011a). Nevertheless, the past 20 years
or so have witnessed a growing group of critical math-
ematics education researchers who clearly understand
that “even within the euphoric ‘post-racial’ sentiments sur-
rounding the Obama presidency . . . race still matters . . .
if we wish to hope that democracy still matters” (Stinson,
2011a, p. 2). Situating their work in the sociopolitical-turn
moment, these researchers have motivated a number of
edited volumes (e.g., Leonard & Martin, 2013; D. B. Martin,
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
2009b; Malloy & Brader-Araje, 1998; Ortiz-Franco,
Hernandez, & de la Cruz, 1999; Strutchens, Johnson,
& Tate, 2000; Téllez, Moschkovich, & Civil, 2011) and, in
large part, the creation of the Journal of Urban Mathemat-
ics Education (L. E. Matthews, 2008; Stinson, 2010).
On the whole, these researchers push against the
mathematics education “gap-gazing fetish” (R. Gutiérrez,
2008a, p. 357) in research that most often conceptualizes
race as an easily defined (or often not-defined-at-all) cate­
gory to which a person belongs and to which particular
traits or achievement outcomes can be assigned (Parks
& Schmeichel, 2011). This one-dimensional perspective
of race as a category has resulted in decades of research
in which Black and Brown children and Black and Brown
cultures (and most other non-White, non-European chil-
dren and cultures) are positioned as somehow deficient
(R. Gutiérrez, 2008a). In explicitly rejecting the dis-
course of deficiency (Stinson, 2006), mathematics edu-
cation researchers who explore the complexities of race,
racism, and White supremacy have begun to recognize
(some explicitly and others implicitly) mathematics edu-
cation as a White institutional space (D. B. Martin, 2010,
2011) and mathematics teaching and learning as racial-
ized forms of experience for all children (e.g., White and
Asian children’s racialized experiences most often posi-
tion them as competent doers of mathematics and others
as less competent; D. B. Martin, 2006, 2009a). To fore-
ground students’ (and teachers’) racialized experiences,
mathematics education researchers often pull theoretical
traditions and tools derived from the emancipate or decon-
struct paradigms of inquiry, such as critical race theory
(e.g., Berry, 2008; Jett, 2012, Terry, 2011), Latino/a criti-
cal race theory (e.g., M. V. Gutiérrez, Willey, & Khisty,
2011; Oppland-Cordell, 2014), or other critical theories of
race (e.g., D. B. Martin, 2006, 2009a, 2009c, 2010, 2013).
Developed in the United States, critical race theory
(CRT) examines how the discourses of race, racism, and
White supremacy function within U.S. sociocultural
and sociopolitical structures (e.g., Delgado & Stefancic,
2012; Dixson & Rousseau, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 1998;
Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Tate, 1997). CRT grew
out of the critical legal studies movement of the 1970s,
a small group of lawyers, activists, and legal scholars
who were concerned about and reacting to the erosion
of the advances made during the civil rights movement
(Delgado & Stefancic, 2012). Providing for a more com-
plete and complex analysis of “raced” people and their
(schooling) experiences, critical race theorists borrow
theoretical and methodological traditions from liberalism,
law and society, feminism, Marxism, and poststructural-
ism (Tate, 1997).
143
In the field of education, Ladson-Billings (1998) has
identified four central principles of CRT. The first prin-
ciple is that race is a permanent and endemic component
of U.S. society and culture: “Black people will never gain
full equality in this country. . . . This is a hard-to-accept
fact that all history verifies. We must acknowledge it,
not as a sign of submission, but as an act of ultimate defi-
ance” (Bell, 1992, p. 12). The second principle of CRT
is that the “storytelling” of the individual experience
should be allowed and valued (scientifically); specifically
“counterstories” of raced people whose experiences are
often not told, stories that expose, analyze, and challenge
the majoritarian stories of racial privilege (Solórzano
& Yosso, 2002). Third, those involved in CRT research
maintain a critique on liberalism and argue for radical
solutions. And fourth: “Whites have been the primary
beneficiaries of civil rights legislation” (Ladson-Billings,
1998, p. 12). Although CRT researchers and scholars are
not united through a set of static doctrines or methodolo-
gies, they are united in two common goals: to understand
the construction and perpetuation of the hegemonic
White ideology of the United States and to radically dis-
rupt the bond between law and racial power (Ladson-
Billings, 1998).
In foregrounding issues of race, racism, and White
supremacy, critical race theorists and researchers recon-
figure the debates and critiques of education. They even
often critique reform efforts such as multicultural and
critical education, highlighting their shortcomings in
addressing the White hegemony of U.S. schooling (see
Hilliard, 2001). For example, Tate (1997) provided edu-
cators with the following questions: How do federalism,
standards, and traditional values serve to reify the White
hegemony of schools, while limiting and binding the edu-
cation opportunities of students of color? Does multi-
cultural and critical education ensure the best teaching
practices for students of color? How can multiculturalism
and critical theory be reinterpreted to serve students of
color? Do multicultural and critical education programs
in school uncover the fallacy of the color-blindness and
objective meritocracy of schools? Do educators question
the ahistorical treatment of education, equity, and stu-
dents of color? The common theme of these questions:
the troubling of the hegemonic White ideology that per-
sistently and unjustly prevails in U.S. schools. Overall,
CRT provides innovative and disruptive ways to explore
educational policy, research, and practice as it relates to
race, racism, equity, and social justice.
In his JRME article “Access to Upper-Level Math-
ematics: The Stories of Successful African American
Middle School Boys,” Berry (2008) provided an example
144 ◆ foundations
of how critical race theorists bring the issues of race,
racism, and White supremacy to the foreground. Focusing
on academic and mathematics success, Berry explored
the life and (mathematics) schooling experiences of
eight African American boys. The focus on success was
as unique as it is counter to the vast majority of exis-
tent research on Black boys and male youth, which his-
torically has reported only their “failures” in academics
generally and in mathematics specifically (i.e., the math-
ematics achievement gap). The aim throughout the study
was to expose the racialized (mathematics) experiences
(see D. B. Martin, 2009a) of the eight boys and how they
achieved and persisted in school mathematics in spite
of these experiences. Two research questions guided
the inquiry: “(1) What factors do African American boys
enrolled in Algebra I encounter when gaining access to
high-level mathematics courses? (2) How do they compen-
sate or overcome those factors that (potentially) delimit
access to high-level mathematics courses?” (p. 469)
Berry (2008) positioned the study as a phenomenolog-
ical project because, in his words, “it recognizes under-
standing one’s subjective interpretation of individuals’
lived experiences” (p. 469). Phenomenology, as a method-
ology, “is a reflective enterprise, and in its reflection it is
critical” (M. J. Larrabee, as cited in Crotty, 1998, p. 82);
the critique here was aimed toward racialized (mathe-
matics) experiences. Data collection consisted of student
interviews, questionnaires, mathematics autobiographies,
and documents (e.g., grade reports and standardized test
scores), as well as parent and teacher interviews and
classroom observations.
Throughout the iterative reading and rereading and
coding and recoding data analysis process, Berry (2008)
placed the discourses and discursive practices of rac-
ism at the center. He identified five major themes that
assisted in explaining the boys’ mathematics achieve-
ment and persistence: (1) preschool experiences, (2) rec-
ognition of abilities and advocacy by parents and caring
adults, (3) family and extended family support systems,
(4) positive mathematical and academic identities, and
(5) alternative identities through participation in school
and church activities. Data included extended narra-
tives or counterstories of success from two of the boys
as well as from their parents. These counterstories were
foregrounded by and representative of the racialized
(and gendered) lived experiences of all eight boys. To
conclude, Berry argued for increasing the opportunities
for African American boys to enroll in afterschool and
summer education programs; for changing teachers’
perceptions of African American boys through explicit
professional development; and for raising awareness
among educators, parents, and the public of the distinc-
tive experiences of African American boys.
Other theoretical traditions that critically examine
how the hegemony of White supremacy and racism func-
tion include Latino/a critical race theory (LatCrit) and
race criticality. Mindful that Latino does not refer to a
racial category per se (i.e., Latinos/as can be of any race),
LatCrit extends the central principles of CRT (Lynn
& Parker, 2006; Solórzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001;
Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). Specifically, it addresses the
layers of racialized subordination based on immigration
status, sexuality, culture, language, phenotype, accent, and
surname that are uniquely experienced by Chicanos/as
and Latinos/as (and/or Hispanics) in the United States
(Yosso, 2005). (See Yosso, 2005, for an “intellectual gene-
alogy of critical race theory” that includes AsianCrit,
FemCrit, LatCrit, TribalCrit, and WhiteCrit.)
Race criticality is an emerging theoretical tradition in
which doing race work is seen as exploring “the dialec-
tic between explaining racial oppression and projecting
racial utopia” (Leonardo, 2014 p. 247). Race criticality
draws from CRT as well as critical theory of race (Outlaw,
1990/2013) and race critical theory (Goldberg & Essed,
2002). Both of the latter theories differ from CRT. Criti-
cal theory of race is global in its analyses and draws from
the philosophical and theoretical assumptions of the
Frankfort School; race critical theory recognizes race as
a discursive formation and draws from the philosophi-
cal and theoretical assumptions of poststructuralism
(Leonardo, 2014). (For a full discussion on race see D. B.
Martin, Rousseau Anderson, and Shah, 2017, this volume.)
All of these traditions—CRT, LatCrit, race critical-
ity, critical theory of race, and race critical theory—
maintain issues of race, racism, and White supremacy
in the foreground and have their genesis in the extensive
scholarship of Black scholars of the early 20th century,
such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. Collec-
tively, those involved in these traditions have a goal of
a transformative education and research practice for
raced people from “a nonlinear overlapping polycentric
approach with simultaneous, multiple centers of activity
that, like jazz music, combine discipline, improvisation,
and individuality” (King, 2005, p. 16).
Feminist Theory
Feminist theory, as drawn upon by mathematics educa-
tion researchers through the decades, falls under a num-
ber of paradigms of inquiry (see Table 6.1), including
understanding, emancipating, and deconstructing. In
each of these paradigms, theory has played an important
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
role. Traditional research focused on predicting or under-
standing gender difference. Researchers then aimed
at giving “voice” to females (or males) in mathematics.
More recently, researchers have sought to explain how
gender inequalities are reproduced. Positivist, interpre-
tivist, critical, and poststructural theories all have had
something important to say about gender and its relation
to mathematics teaching and learning.
Feminist researchers have provided evidence that
gender is a key organizing principle in many aspects of
education. They note that policies such as the No Child
Left Behind Act (U.S. Department of Education, 2001)
use gender (along with other social categories) as a legiti-
mate basis for social organization. Such policies make
distinctions between the student population to target
educational provision and resourcing. The principles
behind these policies are gender equality and inclusion;
that is, an understanding that educational opportuni-
ties are open to both female and male students equally
and that both categories of students have the capac-
ity to achieve success in school. Mathematics education
researchers who have focused on emancipation and change
(e.g., Burton, 1995; Leder & Forgasz, 2003) propose gender
equity as a means to create a more socially just and equal
society.
Early research efforts were conducted within a social
context in which the representation of girls and women
had become a key issue. As a consequence, a key focus
revolved around efforts to name differences between boys
and girls. For example, early findings reported that girls
asked fewer and, in particular, more lower-level thinking
questions in class than did boys, and that they received
less attention and less praise and criticism than the boys
in their mathematics classes (Sherman & Fennema,
1977). Girls were shown to be less confident in their math-
ematical ability and did not perceive mathematics to be
as useful as did boys (Fennema & Peterson, 1985). These
findings also showed that girls attributed any good results
to hard work and effort, whereas boys claimed that their
good results came from intellectual expertise.
As a consequence, researchers began to pose critical
questions about the role of education in reproducing gen-
der inequities (see Skelton & Francis, 2003). The focus
of many studies then moved toward the gendered envi-
ronment and focused on uncovering gender blindness as
well as gender biases (e.g., J. R. Becker, 1995). For exam-
ple, Lucey, Brown, Denvir, Askew, and Rhodes (2003)
showed that girls “seem to be more concerned than boys
in trying to remember what the teacher has said and fol-
lowing her instructions” (p. 53). It was also shown that
girls preferred cooperative activities, whereas boys
145
preferred to work in a traditional competitive envi-
ronment (Fox & Soller, 2001; Leder & Forgasz, 2003).
Undergirding these studies was the theory of “gender
role socialization,” which, in time, came to be viewed as
simplistic. Taking up this point, Fennema (1993), in her
address to the International Commission on Mathemat-
ics Instruction (ICMI) Conference—“Gender and Math-
ematics Education”—argued: “There is still no sufficient
evidence to allow us to conclude that interacting more or
differently with girls and boys is a major contributor to
the development of gender differences in mathematics”
(pp. 6–7). Fennema went on to elaborate: “Perhaps we have
been asking the wrong questions as we have studied gen-
der and mathematics. . . . Is there a female way of thinking
about mathematics?” (pp. 26–27).
Fennema’s (1993) query initiated a shift in mathemat-
ics education research toward radical feminist values and
goals. This shift received a clear expression in the work of
Damarin (1995), J. R. Becker (1995), and Burton (1995),
all of whom recognize and celebrate girls’ and women’s
difference from boys and men. Validating women’s expe-
riences cleared a space for new interventions on behalf of
girls in mathematics, based on an interest in more equita-
ble practices. Feminists in other disciplines (e.g., Butler,
1990 [philosophy]; Collins, 1990 [sociology]; hooks, 1983
[literature]; Mohanty & Alexander, 1996 [gender studies]),
however, began to question the assumptions under­
pinning analyses that celebrated girls’ experiences. They
argued that the presumption of an underlying common-
ality between all women and girls shuts out the experi-
ences of women and girls who are not White, Western,
middle class, or heterosexual. Collins and hooks, for
example, were deeply critical of this tendency, arguing
that generalized categories of gender had the effect of
delegitimizing the experiences and knowledge of Black
women. To date, while the experiences and knowledge of
Black and “Latina” girls have not been theorized about
and researched extensively within mathematics edu-
cation, the discussion is beginning to take place (e.g.,
Gholson & Martin, 2014; Guerra & Lim, 2014). Similarly,
research has begun to address the problem associated
with universalizing gender as a category and the impact
of that tendency on male African Americans (e.g., Stinson,
2011b, 2013a).
Poststructural theory has offered a way of thinking
about gender that is not linked to the humanist subject; it
has allowed researchers to think differently about the divi-
sion between females and males. Tools from poststruc-
tural theory, particularly from the work of Foucault (e.g.,
1966/1994, 1969/1972, 1981), have provided the means for
revealing how gender inequalities are reproduced within
146 ◆ foundations
mathematics education and also the means for explain-
ing how social relations of gender might be transformed
(see Walshaw, 2001, 2005). Specifically, poststructural
theories of gender are concerned with “breaking down the
female/male binary that is seen to influence how we
think about the world, and to constrain the possibilities
for males and females” (Alton-Lee & Praat, 2000, p. 43).
Such theories require a shift from understanding gender
as essential difference toward understanding gender as
emerging from social contexts, processes, and actions
that are always relational. These theories recognize that
other categories such as class, race, and ethnicity are also
important dimensions of difference.
Poststructural theories on gender endeavor to blur
the distinctions between male and female. They maintain
that, overlaid by structures and processes, social catego-
ries like male and female are constantly negotiated by
individuals (see Butler, 1990; Davies, 1989; Walkerdine,
1990b) as various modes of gendered subjectivity become
available. Pink (2001) has elaborated that “it is only in
specific social interactions that the gender identity of any
individual comes in to being in relation to the negotiations
that it undertakes with other individuals” (p. 21; empha-
sis in original). Those relations, Ernest (1995) has pointed
out, may be contradictory.
In her JRME article “A Foucauldian Gaze on Gender
Research: What Do You Do When Confronted With the
Tunnel at the End of the Light?” Walshaw (2001) pro-
vided an example of a poststructural feminist analysis
of girls’ participation in mathematics. Engaging post-
structural debates over knowledge and power, Walshaw
explored how female subjectivity is lived within the
mathematics classroom. Her aim was to produce a differ-
ent kind of story about girls and school mathematics.
Walshaw (2001) focused on one female student who
was enrolled in a senior secondary school introductory
calculus class. In listening to the recordings of the stu-
dent, Walshaw used the poststructural strategy of “hear-
ing between the words”: listening for both what was said
and what was not said. Mindful of the poststructural
claim that there is no “view from nowhere” (Haraway,
1988); she sought to represent gender as an effect of spe-
cific relations of power. Two key terms—discourse and
power—were employed to both analyze and represent
gendered subjectivity throughout the study.
Poststructural analyses, generally speaking, cannot
be described as functional and atomistic (Britzman,
1995). For example, in the case of the student’s record-
ings, discourses changed moment by moment. Impor-
tantly, the student’s identity changed, in parallel with
her involvement and emotional investments within those
discourses. Accounting for those changes as well as for
competing discourses, Walshaw (2001) used a system-
atic process of documenting, over a time period, how the
student was positioned in each discourse as powerful,
subordinate, or otherwise. Details of two specific dis-
courses are in the article. In the first excerpt, the student
is positioned as an “authority” of differentiating rational
functions containing surds. She is shown to have learned
the relevant rules of calculus differentiation and is able
to teach those same rules to the male student who sits
next to her. In the second excerpt, the student is no longer
constituted as a powerful female learner in the classroom
context but rather as, in her own words, “blonde.”
Foucault’s ideas proved helpful in revealing the con-
tradictory discourses that operated on the student within
the classroom. They were useful too for showing how
she lived out those contradictions. Walshaw (2001) con-
cluded that it is within this space of contradictions that
transformation and new positionings for girls and math-
ematics can occur.
In the end, poststructural formulations reconstitute
the status of gender from unalterable sexual difference to
negotiable discursive relation. With this reconstitution,
the research focus is no longer on understanding (or mak-
ing meaning of) gender differences but rather on under-
standing how particular material and discursive social
structures and processes create the conditions for gen-
der to exist as difference. Using this theorizing, Mendick
(2003) has explored why a “disproportionate number of
girls opt out of powerful areas of curriculum” (p. 169). In
a similar way, Damarin (1995) built on the poststructural
idea that discourses constitute individuals as thinking,
feeling, and acting subjects to argue that “regardless of
how mathematically competent a woman becomes she
can never escape discursive practices that reify the idea
that mathematics is, indeed, a male domain” (p. 250).
Theoretical Considerations for the Future
In 1992, Grouws noted that there has been sufficient
progress in mathematics education research over the
past two decades (the 1970s and 1980s) “to character-
ize research on mathematics education as a research
field and to identify those conducting these studies as
the mathematics education research community” (p. ix).
Later in the decade, in the foreword to Mathematics Educa-
tion as a Research Domain: A Search for Identity, Sierpinska
and Kilpatrick (1998) wrote—
The theme of the ICMI Study reported in this book was for-
mulated as a question: ‘What Is Research in Mathematics
Education and What Are Its Results?’ No single agreed-upon
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
and definite answer to the question, however, is to be found in
these pages. What the reader will find instead is a multitude of
answers, various analyses of the actual directions of research
in mathematics education in different countries, and a num-
ber of visions for the future of that research. (p. x)
These multiple answers and various analyses are
clearly visible within the moments of mathematics edu-
cation research as depicted in Table 6.1 presented earlier.
Indeed, similar to researchers in education generally,
researchers in mathematics education have experienced a
proliferation of paradigms to think with when conducting
research on the teaching and learning of mathematics.
Similar to Lather (2006), we believe that this prolifera-
tion of paradigms is a good thing. Is it possible, then, to
characterize mathematics education research? What
can we say about its identity? In response, we turn to cul-
tural and social psychologists (e.g., Downey et al., 2005)
and their understanding of identity as multidimensional
and dynamic, highly context dependent, and constantly
transforming. In our view, an identity for mathematics
education research is one that is fragmented, incom-
plete, and continually reconstituted within sociopoliti-
cal relations of power. Such a perspective refutes closure
and keeps the possibilities for mathematics teaching and
learning open to multiple and uncertain interpretations
and analyses.
Our objective in this chapter was to provide an intro-
duction to different theoretical frontiers that disrupt the
status quo. Along the way we showed that theoretical
traditions are embedded in larger paradigms of inquiry.
Each paradigm of inquiry is underpinned by its own set of
assumptions of a philosophical type regarding truth, cer-
tainty, and logical consistency. Irrespective of paradigm,
mathematics education research cannot escape entan-
glement with and in these larger philosophical issues. For
example, the most recent theoretical traditions depicted
in Table 6.1 represent the sociopolitical-turn moment of
mathematics education research aimed at emancipation
or deconstruction. We have shown that researchers who
draw on these theoretical traditions disrupt the status
quo by providing critical or poststructural approaches to
understanding the complexities of mathematics teach-
ing and learning. But if the conduct of research in mathe-
matics education is left open, what will research look like
next? What traditions are emerging that will enable new
productive possibilities?
In wider social science research, while there has been
a growing sense of the value of the different paradigms of
inquiry, there has also been an acknowledgement of the
limitations of each. A new moment is emerging—one that
embraces the affective dimensions in a way that is absent
147
from current discussions concerning subjectivity, iden-
tity, and culture. The affective turn in social theory is not
undergirded by a conception of affect and emotion as felt
states of a conscious interior experience. Rather, affect is
formulated as constitutive of and relational to our being
in the world. Identities, practices, and processes of math-
ematics education are not static but are always affected
and hence always emergent. The significance of the affec-
tive turn for mathematics education is that it allows a
shift from the negatively fueled purposes of critique or
deconstruction to one invested in a positive dialectic.
However, we wonder if the political context of our
times will permit the take up of new paradigms. Given
the resurgence of the paradigm wars at the turn of the
21st century, we wonder if the battles over the nature
of knowledge, truth, reality, reason, power, science, evi-
dence, and so forth, will continue indefinitely. Or might
the battles wane, as mathematics education researchers,
funding agencies, and policy makers come to a different
understanding of “what works”? How do we, the commu-
nity of mathematics education researchers, learn to eval-
uate science across paradigms? How do we learn to use
science that produces different knowledge differently? If
we acknowledge that the search for a single identity for
mathematics education research is not particularly help-
ful, how do we prepare future mathematics education
researchers? How do we learn to talk across paradigms?
How do we learn that embracing different paradigms
does not have to lead to conflict?
Perhaps the answers to these questions can be found
by going back to the question that is the foundation
stone of mathematics education: What is mathematics?
(Higginson, 1980). As Higginson suggested, answers to
this question should be informed by four interrelated
disciplines: mathematics, psychology, sociology, and phi-
losophy. But do we provide future mathematics education
researchers opportunities to engage with philosophy? We
may require future researchers to take multiple advanced
mathematics courses, but do we require a course (or
courses) in the philosophy of mathematics? We may require
future researchers to take multiple courses in psychology
and sociology, but do we require multiple courses in the
philosophy of knowing and being? Furthermore, who owns
the question, what is mathematics? Is it only mathemati-
cians and mathematics educators, or do other disciplin-
ary professionals such as computer scientists, engineers,
biologists, and so forth, have a say? In our search for an
identity, have we limited and simplified the uncertainty
of mathematics and mathematics teaching and learning
as we (attempt to) disentangle mathematics education
research from philosophy? Rota (1981/1988), in the intro-
duction to Davis and Hersh’s classic text The Mathematical
148 ◆ foundations
Experience, wrote: “At the turn of the century, the Swiss
historian Jakob Burckhardt, who, unlike most histori-
ans, was fond of guessing the future, once confided to his
friend Friedrich Nietzsche the prediction that the Twen-
tieth Century would be ‘the age of oversimplification’”
(p. xvii).
As we move forward into the 21st century, as a com-
munity might we refute the oversimplification of the pro-
nouncements made during the 20th century? We should
take the lead among the wider community of education
researchers in understanding that the proliferation of
paradigms is indeed a good thing to think with as we col-
lectively aim toward transforming mathematics teach-
ing and learning into an empowering experience for all.
References
Agger, B. (1991). Critical theory, poststructuralism,
postmodernism: Their sociological relevance. Annual
Review of Sociology, 17, 105–131.
Alrø, H., Ravn, O., & Valero, P. (Eds.). (2010). Critical math-
ematics education: Past, present and future: Festschrift for
Ole Skovsmose. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.
Alton-Lee, A., & Praat, A. (2000). Explaining and addressing
gender differences in the New Zealand compulsory school sector.
Wellington, New Zealand: Ministry of Education.
Anyon, J. (1980). Social class and the hidden curriculum of
work. Journal of Education, 162(1), 67–92.
Anyon, J. (2005). Radical possibilities: Public policy, urban
education, and a new social movement. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Appelbaum, P. (2008). Embracing mathematics: On becoming
a teacher and changing with mathematics. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Apple, M. W. (2014). Official knowledge: Democratic education in
a conservative age (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Atweh, B., Forgasz, H., & Nebres, B. (Eds.). (2001). Sociocultural
research on mathematics education: An international perspective.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bartell, T. G. (2013). Learning to teach mathematics for social
justice: Negotiating social justice and mathematical goals.
Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 44(1), 129–163.
Bartolomé, L. I. (1994). Beyond the methods fetish: Toward a
humanizing pedagogy. Harvard Educational Review, 64(2),
173–194.
Battista, M. T. (2010). Engaging students in meaningful math-
ematics learning: Different perspectives, complementary
goals. Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, 3(2), 34–46.
Retrieved from http://ed-osprey.gsu.edu/ojs/index.php
/JUME/article/view/115/58
Becker, J. P. (1970). Research in mathematics education:
The role of theory and of aptitude-treatment-interaction.
Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 1(1), 19–28.
Becker, J. R. (1995). Women’s ways of knowing in mathemat-
ics. In G. Kaiser & P. Rogers (Eds.), Equity in mathematics
education: Influences of feminism and culture. (pp. 164–174).
London, United Kingdom: Falmer.
Bell, D. A. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence
of racism. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Berry, R. Q., III. (2008). Access to upper-level mathematics:
The stories of successful African American middle school
boys. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 39(5),
464–488.
Bibby, T. (2009). How do pedagogic practices impact on
learner identities in mathematics? A psychoanalytically
framed response. In L. Black, H. Mendick, & Y. Solomon
(Eds.), Mathematical relationships in education: Identities and
participation (pp. 123–135). New York, NY: Routledge.
Black, L., Mendick, H., & Solomon, Y. (Eds.). (2009). Mathemati-
cal relationships in education: Identities and participation.
London, United Kingdom: Routledge.
Boaler, J. (1999). Participation, knowledge and beliefs:
A community perspective on mathematics learning.
Educational Studies in Mathematics, 40(3), 259–281.
Boaler, J. (2008). When politics took the place of inquiry:
A response to the National Mathematics Advisory Panel’s
review of instructional practices. Educational Researcher,
37(9), 588–594.
Bottomore, T. B. (Ed.). (2001). A dictionary of Marxist thought
(2nd ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Bowles, S. (1971). Unequal education and the reproduction
of the social division of labor. Review of Radical Political
Economics, 3(4), 1–30.
Brantlinger, A. (2013). Between politics and equations: Teach-
ing critical mathematics in a remedial secondary classroom.
American Educational Research Journal, 50(5), 1050–1080.
Britzman, D. (1995). The question of belief: Writing poststruc-
tural ethnography. Qualitative Studies in Education, 8(3),
229–238.
Bronner, S. E. (2011). Critical theory: A very short introduction.
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Brown, T. (1997). Mathematics education and language: Inter-
preting hermeneutics and post-structuralism. Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Kluwer.
Brown, T. (Ed.). (2008). The psychology of mathematics education:
A psychoanalytic displacement. Rotterdam, The Netherlands:
Sense.
Brown, T., & McNamara, O. (2011). Becoming a mathematics
teacher: Identity and identifications. Dordrecht, The Nether-
lands: Springer.
Brown, T., & Walshaw, M. (2012). Mathematics education and
contemporary theory: Guest editorial. Educational Studies in
Mathematics, 80(1–2), 1–8.
Burton, L. (1995). Moving towards a feminist epistemology
of mathematics. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 28(3),
275–291.
Burton, L. (Ed.). (2003). Which way social justice in mathematics
education? Westport, CT: Praeger.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of
identity. New York, NY: Routledge.
Cobb, P. (2007). Putting philosophy to work: Coping with multi-
ple theoretical perspectives. In F. K. Lester Jr. (Ed.), Second
handbook of research on mathematics teaching and learning
(Vol. 1, pp. 3–38). Charlotte, NC: Information Age; Reston,
VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, conscious-
ness, and the politics of empowerment. New York, NY: Routledge.
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
Confrey, J. (2010). “Both and”—Equity and mathematics: A
Response to Martin, Gholson, and Leonard. Journal of Urban
Mathematics Education, 3(2), 25–33. Retrieved from http://
ed-osprey.gsu.edu/ojs/index.php/JUME/article/view/108/53
Crotty, M. (1998). The foundations of social research: Meaning and
perspective in the research process. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Damarin, S. (1995). Gender and mathematics from a femi-
nist standpoint. In W. Secada, E. Fennema, & L. Adajian
(Eds.), New directions for equity in mathematics education
(pp. 242–257). Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge
University Press.
D’Ambrosio, U. (1985). Ethnomathematics and its place in the
history and pedagogy of mathematics. For the Learning of
Mathematics, 5(1), 44–48.
Davies, B. (1989). The discursive production of the male/female
dualism in school settings. Oxford Review of Education,
15(3), 229–241.
de Freitas, E. (2010). Regulating mathematics classroom
discourse: Text, context, and intertextuality. In M. Walshaw
(Ed.), Unpacking pedagogy: New perspectives for mathematics
classrooms (pp. 129–151). Charlotte, NC: Information Age.
de Freitas, E., Lerman, S., & Parks, A. N. (2017). Qualitative
methods. In J. Cai (Ed.), Compendium for research in mathe-
matics education (pp. 159–182). Reston, VA: National Council
of Teachers of Mathematics.
de Freitas, E., & Nolan, K. T. (2008). Opening the research text:
Critical insights and in(ter)ventions into mathematics educa-
tion. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.
Delgado, R., & Stefancic, J. (2012). Critical race theory: An intro-
duction (2nd ed.). New York, NY: New York University Press.
Derrida, J. (1976). Of grammatology. Baltimore, MD: The John
Hopkins University Press.
Dixson, A. D., & Rousseau, C. K. (Eds.). (2006). Critical race
theory in education: All God’s children got a song. New York,
NY: Routledge.
Donmoyer, R. (2006). Take my paradigm . . . please! The legacy
of Kuhn’s construct in educational research. International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 19(1), 11–34.
Downey, G., Chatman, C., London, B., Cross, W. E., Jr.,
Hughes, D., Moje, E., Way, N., & Eccles, J. S. (2005). Intro-
duction. In G. Downey, J. S. Eccles, & C. Chatman (Eds.),
Navigating the future: Social identity, coping, and life tasks
(pp. 1–20). New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Du Bois, W. E. B. (1989). The souls of Black folk (Bantam classic
ed.). New York, NY: Bantam Books. (Original work published
1903)
Ernest, P. (1995). Values, gender and images of mathematics:
A philosophical perspective. International Journal of Mathe-
matical Education in Science and Technology, 26(3), 449–462.
Ernest, P. (2002). Empowerment in mathematics education.
Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal, 15.
Retrieved from http://www.ex.ac.uk/~PErnest/pome15
/empowerment.htm
Ernest, P. (Ed.). (2007). Special issue on social justice [Special
issue]. Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal, 21–22.
Retrieved from http://people.exeter.ac.uk/PErnest/
Esmonde, I., & Caswell, B. (2010). Teaching mathematics for
social justice in multicultural, multilingual elementary
classrooms. Canadian Journal of Science, Mathematics and
Technology Education, 10(3), 244–254.
149
Fennema, E. (1993, October). Mathematics, gender and research.
Paper presented at the International Commission on Math-
ematics Instruction: Gender and Mathematics Education,
Hoor, Sweden.
Fennema, E., Carpenter, T. P., Franke, M. L., Levi, L., Jacobs,
V. R., & Empson, S. B. (1996). A longitudinal study of
learning to use children’s thinking in mathematics instruc-
tion. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 27(4),
403–434.
Fennema, E., & Peterson, P. (1985). Autonomous learning behav-
iour: A possible explanation of gender-related differences in
mathematics. In L. Wilkinson & C. Marrett (Eds.), Gender-
related differences in classroom interactions (pp. 17–35).
New York, NY: Academic.
Fine, M. (1994). Working the hyphens: Reinventing self and other
in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.),
Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 70–82). Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Fitzsimmons, G. (2002). What counts as mathematics? Technolo-
gies of power in adult and vocational education. Norwell, MA:
Kluwer.
Fordham, S. (2008). Beyond Capital High: On dual citizenship
and the strange career of “acting White.” Anthropology &
Education Quarterly, 39(3), 227–246.
Fordham, S., & Ogbu, J. U. (1986). Black students’ school success:
Coping with the “burden of ‘acting White.’” The Urban Review,
18(3), 176–206.
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge (A. M.
Sheridan Smith, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
(Original work published 1969)
Foucault, M. (1980). Truth and power (C. Gordon, L. Marshall,
J. Mepham, & K. Soper, Trans.). In C. Gordon (Ed.), Power/
knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972–1977
by Michel Foucault (pp. 109–133). New York, NY: Pantheon.
(Original work published 1977)
Foucault, M. (1981). The order of discourse. In R. Young (Ed.), A
post-structuralist reader (pp. 48–78). London, United Kingdom:
Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original lecture delivered 1970)
Foucault, M. (1994). The order of things: An archaeology of the
human sciences. New York, NY: Vintage Books. (Original
work published 1966)
Foucault, M. (1996). The concern for truth. In S. Lotringer
(Ed.), Foucault live: Interviews, 1961–1984 (pp. 455–464).
New York, NY: Semiotext(e). (Original work published
1984)
Fox, L., & Soller, J. (2001). Psychological dimensions of gender
differences in mathematics. In J. Jacobs, J. Becker, & G. Gilmer
(Eds.), Changing the faces of mathematics: Perspectives on
gender (pp. 9–23). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers
of Mathematics.
Frankenstein, M. (1983). Critical mathematics education:
An application of Paulo Freire’s epistemology. Journal of
Teacher Education, 164, 315–339.
Frankenstein, M. (2005). Reading the world with mathematics:
Goals for a criticalmathematical literacy curriculum. In
E. Gutstein & B. Peterson (Eds.), Rethinking mathematics:
Teaching social justice by the numbers (pp. 19–28). Milwaukee,
WI: Rethinking Schools.
Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power, and
liberation. Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey.
150 ◆ foundations
Freire, P. (Ed.). (1997). Mentoring the mentor: A critical dialogue
with Paulo Freire. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos,
Trans., 30th anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Continuum.
(Original work published 1970)
Freire, P. (2005). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those
who dare to teach (expanded ed.). Boulder, CO: Westview.
Gage, N. L. (1989). The paradigm wars and their aftermath:
A “historical” sketch of research on teaching since 1989.
Education Researcher, 18(7), 4–10.
Gates, P., & Jorgensen (Zevenbergen), R. (Eds.). (2009). Social
justice mathematics teacher education [Special issue].
Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 12 (3–6).
Gates, P., & Vistro-Yu, C. P. (2003). Is mathematics for all?
In A. J. Bishop, M. A. Clements, C. Keitel, J. Kilpatrick, &
F. K. S. Leung (Eds.), Second international handbook
of mathematics education (Vol. 1, pp. 31–73). Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Kluwer.
Gholson, M., & Martin, D. B. (2014). Smart girls, black girls,
mean girls, and bullies: At the intersection of identities and
the mediating role of young girls’ social network in mathe-
matical communities of practice. Journal of Education, 19(1),
19–33.
Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded
theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago, IL: Aldine.
Goldberg, D. T., & Essed, P. (2002). Introduction: From racial
demarcations to multiple identifications. In P. Essed & D. T.
Goldberg (Eds.), Race critical theories (pp. 1–11). Malden,
MA: Blackwell.
Gonzalez, L. (2009). Teaching mathematics for social justice:
Reflections on a community of practice for urban high
school mathematics teachers. Journal of Urban Mathematics
Education, (2)1, 22–51. Retrieved from http://ed-osprey.gsu
.edu/ojs/index.php/JUME/article/view/32
Good, T. L., & Grouws, D. A. (1979). The Missouri Mathematics
Effectiveness Project: An experimental study in fourth-grade
classrooms. Journal of Educational Psychology, 71(3), 355–362.
Greer, B., & Mukhopadhyay, S. (2012). The hegemony of
mathematics. In O. Skovsmose & B. Greer (Eds.), Opening
the cage: Critique and politics of mathematics (pp. 229–248).
Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.
Greer, B., Mukhopadhyay, S., Powell, A. B., & Nelson-Barber, S.
(Eds.). (2009). Culturally responsive mathematics education.
New York, NY: Routledge.
Gregson, S. A. (2013). Negotiating social justice teaching: One
full-time teacher’s practice viewed from the trenches. Jour-
nal for Research in Mathematics Education, 44(1), 164–198.
Grouws, D. A. (Ed.). (1992). Handbook of research on mathematics
teaching and learning. New York, NY: Macmillan.
Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1994). Competing paradigms in
qualitative research. In N. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.),
Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 105–117). Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage.
Guerra, P., & Lim, W. (2014). Latinas and problem solving: What
they say and what they do. Journal of Urban Mathematics Edu-
cation, 7(2), 55–75. Retrieved from http://ed-osprey.gsu
.edu/ojs/index.php/JUME/article/view/198/162
Gutiérrez, M. V., Willey, C., & Khisty, L. L. (2011). (In)equitable
schooling and mathematics of marginalized students: Through
the voices of urban Latinas/os. Journal of Urban Mathematics
Education, 4(2), 26–43. Retrieved from http://ed-osprey.gsu
.edu/ojs/index.php/JUME/article/viewFile/112/91
Gutiérrez, R. (2002). Enabling the practice of mathematics
teachers in context: Toward a new equity research agenda.
Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 4(2–3), 145–187.
Gutiérrez, R. (2008a). A “gap-gazing” fetish in mathematics
education? Problematizing research on the achievement
gap. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 39(4),
357–364.
Gutiérrez, R. (2008b, Fall/Winter). Realizing the potential of
Chicanas/os and Native Americans: Engaging identity and
power issues in teaching students mathematics and science.
SACNAS News.
Gutiérrez, R. (2013). The sociopolitical turn in mathematics
education. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education,
44(1), 37–68.
Gutstein, E. (2003). Teaching and learning mathematics for
social justice in an urban, Latino school. Journal for Research
in Mathematics Education, 34(1), 37–73.
Gutstein, E. (2006). Reading and writing the world with math-
ematics: Toward a pedagogy for social justice. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Gutstein, E., & Peterson, B. (Eds.). (2013). Rethinking math-
ematics: Teaching social justice by the numbers (2nd ed.).
Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools.
Hanley, U. (2010). Teachers and curriculum change: Working
to get it right. In M. Walshaw (Ed.), Unpacking pedagogy:
New perspectives for mathematics classrooms (pp. 3–19).
Charlotte, NC: Information Age.
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question
in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist
Studies, 14, 575–599.
Hardy, T. (2009). What does a discourse-oriented examination
have to offer teacher development? The problem with primary
mathematics teachers. In L. Black, H. Mendick, & Y. Solomon
(Eds.), Mathematical relationships in education: Identities and
participation (pp. 185–197). New York, NY: Routledge.
Heid, M. K. (2010). Where’s the math (in mathematics education
research)? Journal for Research in Mathematics Education,
41(2), 102–103.
Henriques, J., Holloway, W., Urwin, C., Venn, C., & Walkerdine, V.
(1984). Changing the subject. London, United Kingdom:
Methuen.
Hesse-Biber, S. N., & Yaiser, M. L. (Eds.). (2004). Feminist
perspectives on social research. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Higginson, W. (1980). On the foundations of mathematics edu-
cation. For the Learning of Mathematics, 1(2), 3–7.
Hill, D., McLaren, P., Cole, M., & Rikowski, G. (Eds.). (2002).
Marxism against postmodernism in educational theory. Lanham,
MD: Lexington Books.
Hilliard, A. G., III. (2001). “Race,” identity, hegemony, and
education: What do we need to know now? In W. H. Watkins,
J. H. Lewis, & V. Chou (Eds.), Race and education: The roles
of history and society in educating African American students
(pp. 7–33). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
hooks, b. (1983). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism.
London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press.
hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope.
New York, NY: Routledge.
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
Jablonka, E., Wagner, D., & Walshaw, M. (2013). Theories for
studying social, political and cultural dimensions of math-
ematics education. In J. Clements, C. Keitel, A. J. Bishop,
J. Kilpatrick, & F. K. S. Leung (Eds.), Third international
handbook of mathematics education (pp. 41–67). Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Springer.
Jett, C. C. (2012). Critical race theory interwoven with math-
ematics education research. Journal of Urban Mathematics
Education, 5(1), 21–30. Retrieved from http://ed-osprey.gsu
.edu/ojs/index.php/JUME/article/viewArticle/163
Kelly, A. E. (Ed.). (2008). Reflections on the National Mathemat-
ics Advisory Panel final report [Special issue]. Educational
Researcher, 37(9).
Kilpatrick, J. (1992). A history of research in mathematics
education. In D. A. Grouws (Ed.), Handbook of research on
mathematics teaching and learning (pp. 3–38). New York, NY:
Macmillan.
Kincheloe, J. L., McLaren, P., & Steinberg, S. R. (2011). Critical
pedagogy and qualitative research: Moving beyond the brico-
lage. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualita-
tive research (4th ed., pp. 163–177). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
King, J. E. (2005). A transformative vision of Black education
and human freedom. In J. E. King (Ed.), Black education: A
transformative research and action agenda for the new century
(pp. 3–17). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Knijnik, G. (2012). Differentially positioned language games:
Ethnomathematics from a philosophical perspective. Educa-
tional Studies in Mathematics, 80(1–2), 87–100.
Kristeva, J. (1984). Revolution in poetic language. New York, NY:
Columbia University.
Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions (3rd ed.).
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (Original work
published 1962)
Lacan, J. (1977). The four fundamental concepts of psycho-analysis.
London, United Kingdom: The Hogarth Press.
Ladson–Billings, G. (1998). Just what is critical race theory and
what’s it doing in a nice field like education? International
Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 11(1), 7–24.
Ladson–Billings, G., & Tate, W. F. (1995). Toward a critical race
theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68.
Lather, P. A. (2006). Paradigm proliferation as a good thing to
think with: Teaching research in education as a wild profu-
sion. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education,
19(1), 35–57.
LeCompte, M. D., Preissle, J., & Tesch, R. (1993). The role of
theory in the research process. Ethnography and qualitative
design in educational research (2nd ed., pp. 116–157).
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Leder, G. C., & Forgasz, H. (2003). Achievement self-rating
and the gender stereotyping of mathematics. In L. Bragg,
C. Campbell, G. Herbert, & J. Mousley (Eds.), Mathematics
education research: Innovation, networking, opportunity,
Proceedings of the 26th annual conference of the Mathematics
Education Research Group of Australasia (MERGA;
pp. 476–483). Sydney, Australia: MERGA.
Leistyna, P., & Woodrum, A. (1996). Context and culture:
What is critical pedagogy? In P. Leistyna, A. Woodrum,
& S. A. Sherblom (Eds.), Breaking free: The transformative
power of critical pedagogy (pp. 1–7). Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Educational Review.
151
Leistyna, P., Woodrum, A., & Sherblom, S. A. (Eds.). (1996).
Breaking free: The transformative power of critical pedagogy.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Educational Review.
Leonard, J. (2008). Culturally specific pedagogy in the mathematics
classroom: Strategies for teachers and students. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Leonard, J., Brooks, W., Barnes–Johnson, J., & Berry, R. Q.
(2010). The nuances and complexities of teaching math-
ematics for cultural relevance and social justice. Journal
of Teacher Education, 61(3), 261–270.
Leonard, J., & Martin, D. B. (Eds.). (2013). The brilliance of Black
children in mathematics: Beyond the numbers and toward new
discourse. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.
Leonardo, Z. (2014). Dialectics of race criticality: Studies in
racial stratification and education. In A. D. Reid, E. P. Hart,
& M. A. Peters (Eds.), A companion to research in education
(pp. 247–257). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer.
Lerman, S. (1996). Intersubjectivity in mathematics learning:
A challenge to the radical constructivist paradigm? Journal
for Research in Mathematics Education, 27(2), 133–150.
Lerman, S. (2000a). A case of interpretations of social:
A response to Steffe and Thompson. Journal for Research
in Mathematics Education, 31(2), 210–227.
Lerman, S. (2000b). The social turn in mathematics educa-
tion research. In J. Boaler (Ed.), Multiple perspectives on
mathematics teaching and learning (pp. 19–44). Westport,
CT: Ablex.
Lerman, S. (2009). Pedagogy, discourse, and identity. In L. Black,
H. Mendick, & Y. Solomon (Eds.), Mathematical relationships in
education: Identities and participation (pp. 147–155). New York,
NY: Routledge.
Lerman, S., Xu, G., & Tsatsaroni, A. (2002). Developing theo-
ries of mathematics education research: The ESM story.
Educational Studies in Mathematics, 51(1–2), 23–40.
Lester, F. K., Jr. (2005). On the theoretical, conceptual, and
philosophical foundations for research in mathematics
education. ZDM—The International Journal on Mathematics
Education, 37(6), 457–467.
Lester, F. K., Jr., & Lambdin, D. V. (2003). From amateur to
professional: The emergence and maturation of the U.S.
mathematics education community. In G. M. A. Stanic &
J. Kilpatrick (Eds.), A history of school mathematics (Vol. 2,
pp. 1629–1700). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers
of Mathematics.
Lester, F. K., Jr., & Wiliam, D. (2000). The evidential basis for
knowledge claims in mathematics education research. Journal
for Research in Mathematics Education, 31(2), 132–137.
Lincoln, Y. S., & Guba, E. G. (2000). Paradigmatic controversies,
contradictions, and emerging confluences. In N. K. Denzin &
Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed.,
pp. 163–188).
Lipman, P. (2011). The new political economy of urban education:
Neoliberalism, race, and the right to the city. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Lubienski, S. T. (2008). On “gap gazing” in mathematics educa-
tion: The need for gaps analyses. Journal for Research in
Mathematics Education, 39(4), 350–356.
Lubienski, S. T., & Bowen, A. (2000). Who’s counting? A survey
of mathematics education research, 1982–1998. Journal for
Research in Mathematics Education, 31(5), 626–633.
152 ◆ foundations
Lubienski, S. T., & Gutiérrez, R. (2008). Bridging the gaps in
perspectives on equity in mathematics education. Journal
for Research in Mathematics Education, 39(4), 365–371.
Lucey, H., Brown, M., Denvir, H., Askew, M., & Rhodes, V.
(2003). Girls and boys in the primary maths classroom. In
C. Skelton & B. Francis (Eds.), Boys and girls in the primary
classroom (pp. 43–58). Buckingham, United Kingdom: Open
University Press.
Lynn, M., & Parker, L. (2006). Critical race studies in education:
Examining a decade of research on U.S. schools. The Urban
Review, 38(4), 257–290.
Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The postmodern condition: A report on
knowledge (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1979)
Malloy, C. E., & Brader-Araje, L. (Eds.). (1998). Challenges
in the mathematics education of African American children:
Proceedings of the Benjamin Banneker Association leadership
conference. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics.
Martin, D. B. (2000). Mathematics success and failure among
African-American youth: The roles of sociohistorical context,
community forces, school influence, and individual agency.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Martin, D. B. (2006). Mathematics learning and participation
as racialized forms of experience: African American parents
speak on the struggle for mathematics literacy. Mathematical
Thinking & Learning, 8(3), 197–229.
Martin, D. B. (2008). E(race)ing race from a national conversa-
tion on mathematics teaching and learning: The National
Mathematics Advisory Panel as White institutional space.
The Montana Mathematics Enthusiast, 5(2–3), 387–398.
Martin, D. B. (2009a). Little Black boys and little Black
girls: How do mathematics education research and policy
embrace them? In S. L. Swars, D. W. Stinson, & S. Lemons-
Smith (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st annual meeting of the
North American Chapter of the International Group for the
Psychology of Mathematics Education (pp. 22–41). Atlanta:
Georgia State University.
Martin, D. B. (Ed.). (2009b). Mathematics teaching, learning,
and liberation in the lives of Black children. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Martin, D. B. (2009c). Researching race in mathematics educa-
tion. Teachers College Record, 111(2), 295–338.
Martin, D. B. (2010). Not-so-strange bedfellows: Racial projects
and the mathematics education enterprise. In U. Gellert,
E. Jablonka, & C. Morgan (Eds.), Proceedings of the Sixth
International Mathematics Education and Society Conference
(Vol. 1, pp. 42–64). Berlin, Germany: Freie Universitat
Berlin.
Martin, D. B. (2011). What does quality mean in the contest
of White institutional space. In B. Atweh, M. Graven,
W. Secada, & P. Valero (Eds.), Mapping equity and quality
in mathematics education (pp. 437–450). Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Springer.
Martin, D. B. (2013). Race, racial projects, and mathematics
education. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education,
44(1), 316–333.
Martin, D. B., Gholson, M. L., & Leonard, J. (2010). Mathemat-
ics as gatekeeper: Power and privilege in the production of
knowledge. Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, 3(2),
12–24. Retrieved from http://ed-osprey.gsu.edu/ojs/index
.php/JUME/article/view/95/57
Martin, D. B., Rousseau Anderson, C., & Shah, N. (2017). Race
and mathematics education. In J. Cai (Ed.), Compendium for
research in mathematics education (pp. 607–636). Reston, VA:
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Martin, K. (2003). Ways of knowing, being and doing: A theoreti-
cal framework and methods for indigenous and indigenist
research. Journal of Australian Studies, 27(76), 203–214.
Matthews, L. E. (2008). Illuminating urban excellence: A move-
ment of change within mathematics education. Journal of
Urban Mathematics Education, 1(1), 1–4. Retrieved from
http://ed-osprey.gsu.edu/ojs/index.php/JUME/article
/view/20/9
Matthews, W. (1984). Influences on the learning and participa-
tion of minorities in mathematics. Journal for Research in
Mathematics Education, 15(2), 84–95.
McLaren, P. (1999). A pedagogy of possibility: Reflecting upon
Paulo Freire’s politics of education. Educational Researcher,
28(2), 49–56.
McLaren, P., & Kincheloe, J. L. (Eds.). (2007). Critical pedagogy:
Where are we now? New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Meaney, T. (2013). The privileging of English in mathematics
education research, just a necessary evil? In M. Berger,
K. Brodie, V. Frith, & K. le Roux (Eds.), Proceedings of the
7th International Mathematics Education and Society Conference
(Vol. 1, pp. 65–84). Cape Town, South Africa: MES7.
Mendick, H. (2003) Choosing maths/doing gender: A look at
why there are more boys than girls in advanced mathemat-
ics classes in England. In L. Burton (Ed.), Which way social
justice in mathematics education? (pp. 169–187). Westport,
CT: Praeger.
Mendick, H. (2006). Masculinities in mathematics. Maidenhead,
United Kingdom: Open University Press.
Mendick, H., Moreau, M.-P., & Epstein, D. (2009). Special
cases: Neoliberalism, choice, and mathematics. In L. Black,
H. Mendick, & Y. Solomon (Eds.), Mathematical relationships
in education: Identities and participation (pp. 71–82). London,
United Kingdom: Routledge.
Mohanty, C. T., & Alexander, M. J. (Eds.). (1996). Feminist
genealogies, colonial legacies, democratic futures. New York,
NY: Routledge Press.
Morgan, C. (2009). Questioning the mathematics curriculum:
A discursive approach. In L. Black, H. Mendick, & Y. Solomon
(Eds.), Mathematical relationships in education: Identities
and participation (pp. 97–106). London, United Kingdom:
Routledge.
National Mathematics Advisory Panel. (2008). Foundations
for success: The final report of the National Mathematics
Advisory Panel. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Education.
National Research Council. (2002). Scientific research in educa-
tion. In R. J. Shavelson & L. Towne (Eds.), Committee on
Scientific Principles for Education Research. Washington,
DC: National Academies Press.
Oakes, J. (1985). Keeping track: How schools structure inequality.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Oppland-Cordell, S. (2014). Urban Latina/o undergraduate
students’ negotiations of identities and participation in an
emerging scholars calculus I workshop. Journal of Urban
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
Mathematics Education, 7(1), 1–37. Retrieved from http://
ed-osprey.gsu.edu/ojs/index.php/JUME
Ortiz-Franco, L., Hernandez, N. G., & de la Cruz, Y. (1999).
Changing the faces of mathematics: Perspectives on Latinos.
Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Outlaw, L. T. (2013). Toward a critical theory of “race.” In
B. Alexander & L. James (Eds.), Arguing about science
(pp. 140–159). New York, NY: Routledge. (Original work
published 1990)
Parks, A. N., & Schmeichel, M. (2011, April). Theorizing of race
and ethnicity in mathematics education literature. Paper pre-
sented at the annual meeting of the American Educational
Research Association, New Orleans, LA.
Parks, A. N., & Schmeichel, M. (2012). Obstacles to addressing
race and ethnicity in mathematics education literature.
Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 43(3),
238–252.
Peterson, B. (2012). Numbers count: Mathematics across the
curriculum. In A. A. Wager & D. W. Stinson (Eds.), Teaching
mathematics for social justice: Conversations with educators
(pp. 147–159). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics.
Pink, S. (2001). Doing visual ethnography. London, United
Kingdom: Sage.
Popkewitz, T. S. (1988). Knowledge, power, and a general cur-
riculum. In I. Westbury & A. Purvis (Eds.), Cultural literacy
and the idea of general education, Part 2 (pp. 69–93). Chicago,
IL: National Society for the Study of Education.
Popkewitz, T. S. (2004). The alchemy of the mathematics
curriculum: Inscriptions and the fabrication of the child.
Educational Research Journal, 41(1), 3–34.
Powell, A. B. (2012). The historical development of critical-
mathematics education. In A. A. Wager & D. W. Stinson
(Eds.), Teaching mathematics for social justice: Conversations
with educators (pp. 21–34). Reston, VA: National Council of
Teachers of Mathematics.
Powell, A. B., & Frankenstein, M. (Eds.). (1997). Ethnomathemat-
ics: Challenging Eurocentrism in mathematics education. Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press.
Powell, G. C. (2012). Teaching mathematics for social justice:
The end of “When are we ever going to use this?” In A. A.
Wager & D. W. Stinson (Eds.), Teaching mathematics for
social justice: Conversations with educators (pp. 187–197).
Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Radford, L. (2012). Education and the illusions of emancipation.
Educational Studies in Mathematics, 80(1–2), 101–118.
Reason, P. (1994). Three approaches to participative inquiry.
In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of
qualitative research (pp. 324–339). Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage.
Reyes, L. H., & Stanic, G. M. A. (1988). Race, sex, socioeconomic
status, and mathematics. Journal for Research in Mathematics
Education, 19(1), 26–43.
Rogers, P., & Kaiser, G. (Eds.). (1995). Equity in mathematics
education: Influences of feminism and culture. Bristol, PA:
Falmer Press.
Rosenblum, K. E., & Travis, T.-M. (2008). The meaning of dif-
ference: American constructions of race, sex and gender, social
class, sexual orientation, and disability (5th ed.). New York,
NY: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
153
Rota, C.-G. (1988). Introduction. In P. J. Davis & R. Hersh (Eds.),
The mathematical experience (pp. xvii–xix). Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin. (Original work published 1981)
Roth, W.-M., & Radford, L. (2011). A cultural-historical perspec-
tive on mathematics teaching and learning. Rotterdam,
The Netherlands: Sense.
Rush, F. L. (Ed.). (2004). The Cambridge companion to critical
theory. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University
Press.
Secada, W. G. (1992). Race, ethnicity, social class, language,
and achievement in mathematics. In D. A. Grouws (Ed.),
Handbook of research on mathematics teaching and learning
(pp. 623–640). New York: Macmillan.
Seidman, S. (Ed.). (1994). The postmodern turn: New perspectives
on social theory. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge
University Press.
Sherman, J., & Fennema, E. (1977). The study of mathematics
among high school girls and boys: Related variables.
American Educational Research Journal, 14(2), 159–168.
Sierpinska, A., & Kilpatrick, J. (Eds.). (1998). Mathematics
education as a research domain: A search for identity: An ICMI
study. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer.
Silver, E. A., & Herbst, P. G. (2007). Theory in mathematics
education scholarship. In F. K. Lester Jr. (Ed.), Second hand-
book of research on mathematics teaching and learning (Vol. 1,
pp. 39–68). Charlotte, NC: Information Age; Reston, VA:
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Skelton, C., & Francis, B. (Eds.). (2003). Boys and girls in the
primary classroom. Buckingham, United Kingdom: Open
University Press.
Skovsmose, O. (1985). Mathematical education versus critical
education. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 16(4), 337–354.
Skovsmose, O. (1994). Towards a critical mathematics educa-
tion. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 27(1), 35–57.
Skovsmose, O. (2005). Travelling through education: Uncertainty,
mathematics, responsibility. Rotterdam, The Netherlands:
Sense.
Skovsmose, O. (2009). In doubt: About language, mathematics,
knowledge and life-worlds. Rotterdam, The Netherlands:
Sense.
Skovsmose, O., & Greer, B. (Eds.). (2012). Opening the cage:
Critique and politics of mathematics education. Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Springer.
Skovsmose, O., & Nielsen, L. (1996). Critical mathematics edu-
cation. In A. J. Bishop, J. Clements, C. Keitel, J. Kilpatrick,
& C. Laborde (Eds.), International handbook of mathematics
education (Vol. 2, pp. 1257–1288). Dordrecht, The Nether-
lands: Kluwer.
Solórzano, D. G., & Delgado Bernal, D. (2001). Examining trans-
formational resistance through a critical race and LatCrit
theory framework: Chicana and Chicano students in an
urban context. Urban Education, 36(3), 308–342.
Solórzano, D. G., & Yosso, T. J. (2002). Critical race methodology:
Counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for educa-
tion research. Qualitative Inquiry, 8(1), 23–44.
Spinoza, B. (2000). Spinoza: Ethics (G. H. R. Parkinson, Trans.).
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Sriraman, B. (Ed.). (2009). International perspectives on social
justice in mathematics [Monograph 1]. The Montana Math-
ematics Enthusiast.
154 ◆ foundations
Sriraman, B., & English, L. (2010). Theories of mathematics edu-
cation: Seeking new frontiers. Dordrecht, The Netherlands:
Springer.
Stanfield, J. H., II. (1994). Ethnic modeling in qualitative
research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of
qualitative research (pp. 175–188). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Steffe, L. P., & Kieren, T. (1994). Radical constructivism and
mathematics education. Journal for Research in Mathematics
Education, 25(6), 711–733.
Steffe, L. P., & Thompson, P. W. (2000). Interaction or inter-
subjectivity? A reply to Lerman. Journal for Research in
Mathematics Education, 31(2), 191–209.
Steffe, L. P., & Tzur, R. (1994). Interaction and children’s
mathematics. In P. Ernest (Ed.), Constructing mathematical
knowledge: Epistemology and mathematics education (Vol. 4,
pp. 8–32). London, United Kingdom: The Falmer Press.
Steiner, H.-G. (1985). Theory of mathematics education (TME):
An introduction. For the Learning of Mathematics, 5(2), 11–17.
Stinson, D. W. (2004). Mathematics as “gatekeeper” (?): Three
theoretical perspectives that aim toward empowering all
children with a key to the gate. The Mathematics Educator,
14(1), 8–18.
Stinson, D. W. (2006). African American male adolescents,
schooling (and mathematics): Deficiency, rejection, and
achievement. Review of Educational Research, 76(4), 477–506.
Stinson, D. W. (2008). Negotiating sociocultural discourses:
The counter-storytelling of academically (and mathemati-
cally) successful African American male students. American
Educational Research Journal, 45(4), 975–1010.
Stinson, D. W. (2009). The proliferation of theoretical paradigms
quandary: How one novice researcher used eclecticism as a
solution. The Qualitative Report, 14(3), 498–523.
Stinson, D. W. (2010). How is it that one particular statement
appeared rather than another?: Opening a different space
for different statements about urban mathematics educa-
tion. Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, 3(1), 1–11.
Retrieved from http://ed-osprey.gsu.edu/ojs/index.php
/JUME/article/view/116/69
Stinson, D. W. (2011a). Race in mathematics education research:
Are we a community of cowards? Journal of Urban Mathematics
Education, 4(1), 1–6. Retrieved from http://ed-osprey.gsu.edu
/ojs/index.php/JUME/article/view/139/83
Stinson, D. W. (2011b). When the “burden of acting white” is
not a burden: School success and African American male
students. The Urban Review, 43, 43–65.
Stinson, D. W. (2013a). An English only fountain: A response to
Tamsin Meaney’s critique of English privilege in mathemat-
ics education research. In M. Berger, K. Brodie, V. Frith, &
K. le Roux (Eds.), Proceedings of the 7th International Math-
ematics Education and Society Conference (Vol. 1, pp. 85–88).
Cape Town, South Africa: MES7.
Stinson, D. W. (2013b). Negotiating the “white male math myth”:
African American male students and success in school
mathematics. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education,
44(1), 69–99.
Stinson, D. W., Bidwell, C. R., & Powell, G. C. (2012). Critical
pedagogy and teaching mathematics for social justice. Inter-
national Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 4(1), 76–94.
Stinson, D. W., & Bullock, E. C. (2012). Critical postmodern
theory in mathematics education research: A praxis of
uncertainty. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 80(1–2),
41–55.
Stinson, D. W., & Bullock, E. C. (2015). Critical postmodern
methodology in mathematics education research: Promoting
another way of thinking and looking. Philosophy in Mathematics
Education Journal [25th anniversary issue], 29, 1–18. Retrieved
from http://people.exeter.ac.uk/PErnest/pome29/index.html
Stinson, D., & Wager, A. (2012). A sojourn into the empower-
ing uncertainties of teaching and learning mathematics for
social change. In A. A. Wager & D. W. Stinson (Eds.), Teaching
mathematics for social justice: Conversations with educators
(pp. 3–18). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics.
Stocker, D. (2012). Toys for boys? Challenging domestic violence
using mathematics. In A. A. Wager & D. W. Stinson (Eds.),
Teaching mathematics for social justice: Conversations with
educators (pp. 161–174). Reston, VA: National Council of
Teachers of Mathematics.
St. Pierre, E. A. (1997). Circling the text: Normadic writing
practices. Qualitative Inquiry, 3(4), 403–417.
St. Pierre, E. A. (2006). Scientifically based research in educa-
tion: Epistemology and ethics. Adult Education Quarterly,
56(4), 239–266.
St. Pierre, E. A. (2011). Post qualitative research: The critique
and the coming after. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.),
Handbook of qualitative research (4th ed., pp. 611–626).
Strutchens, M. E., Johnson, M. L., & Tate, W. F. (Eds.). (2000).
Changing the faces of mathematics: Perspectives on African
Americans. Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of
Mathematics.
Tate, W. F. (1994). Race, retrenchment, and the reform of school
mathematics. The Phi Delta Kappan, 75(6), 477–484.
Tate, W. F. (1997). Critical race theory and education: History,
theory, and implications. In M. Apple (Ed.), Review of research
in education (Vol. 22, pp. 195–247). Washington, DC: American
Educational Research Association.
Téllez, K., Moschkovich, J., & Civil, M. (Eds.). (2011). Latinos/as
and mathematics education: Research on learning and teaching in
classrooms and communities. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.
Terry, C. L. (2011). Mathematical counterstory and African
American male students: Urban mathematics education
from a critical race theory perspective. Journal of Urban
Mathematics Education, 4(1), 23–49. Retrieved from http://
ed-osprey.gsu.edu/ojs/index.php/JUME/article/view/98
Thompson, A. G. (1984). The relationship of teachers’ concep-
tions of mathematics and mathematics teaching to instruc-
tional practice. Educational Studies in Mathematics, 15(2),
105–127.
U.S. Department of Education. (2001). Public Law print of PL
107–1110, No Child Left Behind Act. Retrieved from http://
www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/esea02/index.html
Valero, P. (2004). Socio-political perspectives on mathematics
education. In P. Valero & R. Zevenbergen (Eds.), Researching
the socio-political dimensions of mathematics education: Issues
of power in theory and methodology (pp. 5–23). Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Springer.
Valero, P., & Zevenbergen, R. (Eds.). (2004). Researching the
socio-political dimensions of mathematics education: Issues of
power in theory and methodology. Dordrecht, The Netherlands:
Springer.
 Exploring Different Theoretical Frontiers for Different (and Uncertain) Possibilities in Mathematics Education Research ◆
Wager, A. A., & Stinson, D. W. (Eds.). (2012). Teaching mathe-
matics for social justice: Conversations with educators. Reston,
VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Walkerdine, V. (1988). The mastery of reason: Cognitive development
and the production of rationality. New York, NY: Routledge.
Walkerdine, V. (1990a). Difference, cognition, and mathematics
education. For the Learning of Mathematics, 10(3), 51–56.
Walkerdine, V. (1990b). Schoolgirl fictions: Schooling for girls.
London, United Kingdom: Verso.
Walkerdine, V. (2004). Preface. In M. Walshaw (Ed.), Mathemat-
ics education within the postmodern (pp. vii–viii). Greenwich,
CT: Information Age.
Walshaw, M. (2001). A Foucauldian gaze on gender research:
What do you do when confronted with the tunnel at the end
of the light? Journal for Research in Mathematics Education,
32(5), 471–492.
Walshaw, M. (Ed.). (2004). Mathematics education within the
postmodern. Greenwich, CT: Information Age.
Walshaw, M. (2005). Getting political and unraveling layers of
gendered mathematical identifications. Cambridge Journal of
Education, 35(1), 19–34.
Walshaw, M. (2007). Working with Foucault in education.
Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense.
View publication stats
155
Walshaw, M. (Ed.). (2010). Unpacking pedagogy: New perspectives
for mathematics classrooms. Charlotte, NC: Information Age.
Walshaw, M. (2013). Post-structuralism and ethical practical
action: Issues of identity and power. Journal for Research in
Mathematics Education, 44(1), 100–118.
Walshaw, M., & Brown, T. (2012). Affective productions of
mathematical experience. Educational Studies in Mathematics,
80(1–2), 185–199.
Wamsted, J. O. (2012). Five things you should probably know
about teaching mathematics for social justice. In A. A.
Wager & D. W. Stinson (Eds.), Teaching mathematics for social
justice: Conversations with educators (pp. 175–185). Reston,
VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race
theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race
Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91.
Zevenbergen, R. (2000). Cracking the “code” of mathematics
classrooms: School success as a function of linguistic, social
and cultural background. In J. Boaler (Ed.), Multiple perspec-
tives on mathematics teaching and learning (pp. 201–223).
Westport, CT: Ablex.
Žižek, S. (Ed.). (1998). Cogito and the unconscious. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.