Mathematics education (research) liberated from teaching and learning: Towards (the future of) doing mathematics

Abstract

Now, what do you make of that? We want to discuss mathematics education, and research in mathematics education (we don't really need to specify, hence the parenthesis). And we want to address teaching and learning (mathematics, but we skipped the parenthesis this time around because we used the word just before) in terms of not-being. You will notice, however, the provocative presence of "liberated", a strong verb which alludes to the idea of freedom while acknowledging certain constraints: captivity, dependence, and even liability. Its selection was a bold choice. But having made such a suggestive statement (without actually saying things upfront), we hastily print a colon to bring in a potential alternative - more positive, one should hope. This alternative mentions to be about going "towards" something. If we care enough to read the next parenthesis (yep, another set!), we realize that this something does not exist yet, since it lies in the future. This something we finally name with the title's last breath: "doing|mathematics". For those who haven't read our recent articles (e.g., in French, Maheux & Proulx, 2014, or in English, Maheux & Proulx, 2015), what that is will remain obscure for some time. In a certain way, it is also still mysterious for us: it is the object of our research, so we haven't "found" it yet. We haven't really found out what "doing|mathematics" is, or what it does. As a piece of research, this article thus also aims to help us figure some of these things out. As a result, this communication piece is not merely for you. And after all, as Von Foerster used to say, in the end you'll know more about us than about the topic of the paper.