Possibilities for mathematics education? Aphoristic fragments from the past

Abstract

Our contribution to this special issue is not intended to offer a theoretical argument in conversation with the papers which form The Disorder on Mathematics Education (Straehler-Pohl, Bohlmann & Pais 2017). It is informed by much of the thinking contained therein and driven by a similar concern with the institutionalisation (and therefore the inevitable co-option and colonisation) of the socio-political dimensions of academic research in mathematics education. However, it is intended to sit alongside as a disorderly and comparatively uninvited guest at the conversation. Rather than advocating a specific set of approaches to the teaching and learning of mathematics for social justice, we are striving after a disorderliness of format to allow the advancement of a (somewhat utopian) imagination and hope, to unsettle ourselves and others and to offer the occasional, penumbrian glimpse of 'the speculative could' (Straehler-Pohl, Pais & Bohlmann 2017, p. 3). We present research fragments collected as part of an activist project without introduction or comment; however, alongside these, we offer more conventional text on neo-liberalism, the need to historicise the present, aphoristic thinking and the need for "somewhere" to be.