Queering the Stats A Review of David Spiegelhalter’s The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data

Abstract

The goal of this review is to explore The Art of Statistics using a mathematics education perspective and to illuminate the ways that it can be used as a resource in math instruction by students, preservice teachers, and math educators in general. I take the approach that the teaching and learning of mathematics is a part of the complex system comprising of many “interacting agents” (Davis, 2018, p. 77), such as students, teacher, curricula, and technology. The content of the book is a potential resource in the classroom, a potential part of the complex network. Echoing Jorge Louis Borges’ claim that a book is not an isolated entity, but that it contains infinite narratives brought by readers (Borges, 2007), I would like to examine the potential role of the content of this book in the learning ecosystem, including how the elements of this book could be used, and repurposed to fit our pedagogical goals.