Peter Gates Centre for Research in Mathematics Education University of Nottingham

1. Recent developments and future research in Critical Mathematics Education (CME)What opportunities are opened up by the 'Corbyn agenda' and the likelihood of the election of a Corbyn-led socialist government Peter Gates Centre for Research in Mathematics Education University of Nottingham

2. Six-year-old Joe lives in one of the poorest areas of Wales. His dad, Paul, works as a part-time shop manager. His mum, Vanessa, is unemployed but is desperate to find work. Black spores and damp in their council home aggravate Joe’s asthma. (Whitham, 2012)

3. Poverty… There are an estimated 3.5 million children living in poverty in the UK and this figure is expected to soar by 400,000 in the coming years. A lack of jobs, stagnating wages, increased living costs and spending cuts are placing enormous pressure on families up and down the UK. Children’s experiences of poverty and the recession are often overlooked. (Whitham, 2012)

4. Tory austerity Since Labour lost the election in 2010, some 700,000 more children have been pushed into poverty by Conservative austerity. (Child Poverty Action Group) TINA – This is Not Accidental

5. They experience: • high-mobility • hunger • repeated failure • low expectations • undeveloped language • clinical depression • poor health • emotional insecurity • low self-esteem • poor relationships • difficult home environment • a focus on survival • no vision of the future And in maths lessons we get them to do “nothing at all”

6. In a study of urban, disadvantaged schools, Martin Haberman (1991) pulled out oft repeated pedagogical strategies. Punishing noncompliance Settling arguments Monitoring working Giving marks • Giving information • Asking closed questions • Giving instructions • Giving tests • Going over tests Is it any different now nearly 30 years later?

7. Things you might not know but ought to know about pupils What did they have for breakfast? Where they go on holiday Health problems at birth Do they have a computer? What do they want for Christmas? • Their postcode • Parental marital status • Parental jobs • Who lives in their house • Parental educational level • Hobbies and skills • Favourite football team • Any brothers and sisters

8. What influences achievement most? Studies have shown that poverty has a stronger influence on achievement than instructional quality, leading to a policy imperative that if we want all pupils to do well “minimizing social inequities must be a fundamental component of education policy. (Georges, 2009) So why do we spend so much time on research into instructional quality?

9. In the UK there is a long history of under achievement in mathematics. This is illustrated by by an over-representation of learners from disadvantaged backgrounds in lower groups. The maths gender gap has been very prevalent in the international literature which is interesting especially given the claim that at least in the US, achievement gaps due to class and race are a staggering 10 times the size of gender gap.

10. It’s not what you, know its where you live Other than the performance of the pupil at an earlier Key Stage test, the type of neighbourhood in which a pupil lives is a more reliable predictor of a pupil’s GCSE performance than any other information held about that pupil on the PLASC database. (Webber and Butler, 2007) How much research do we do on neighbourhoods?

11. The end result is pupils from poorer homes do less well at mathematics. The pedagogical jump here made by teachers is to assume that pupils who are doing less well are not (cap)able of higher order thinking.

12. How much does a bowl of cornflakes at breakfast cost: • If you have a really good job? (30p - 2 Kg box) • If you are on a minimum wage? (40p - 250 gms box)

13. Our own research has revealed that the UK’s lowest income homes are being forced to spend a disproportionate amount of their weekly expenditure on food shopping. We know that shoppers are finding it tough to make their budgets stretch far enough but budgeting shouldn’t mean having to compromise when it comes to having nutritious and varied meals. Martyn Jones, Morrisons Group Corporate Services Director

14. Class Warfare … Mathematics teachers are engaging on a daily basis in attacks on working class children and families: Ability grouping, homework, routine, social control, middle class registers, …

15. Class, in some guise or another, is always a latent variable whose invisibility obscures possibilities for action. However this remains not merely an epistemic or empirical question, but a political and an ideological one and your response to claim, will be similarly political.

16. Can Research be Neutral? For neutrality to exist, one would have to assume, as some apparently do, that it is indeed possible to do research that is uncontaminated by personal and political sympathies. I propose to argue that it is not possible and, therefore that the question is not whether we should take sides, since we inevitably will, but rather whose side are we on? (Howard Becker 1967, p 239)

17. If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality. Desmond Tutu

18. This module is based on • Watson, A., & De Geest, E. (2005). Principled Teaching for Deep Progress - Improving mathematical learning beyond methods and materials • This is an academic paper about the project that was also reported in ‘Watson, A., De Geest, E., & Prestage, S. (2003). Deep Progress in Mathematics: The Improving Attainment in Mathematics Project. Oxford: University of Oxford, Department of Educational Studies.’

19. Task 1: What influences lower attaining students’ experiences of learning mathematics • Make a list of the improvements you would hope to see in the classroom and, if you are working with others, discuss your lists. • Compare your list with the list that the teachers involved in the research project agreed upon (after much discussion).

20. Definitions of improvement • being more active in lessons, for example by participating in discussion, asking and answering questions, volunteering for tasks, offering their own methods • being more willing to share ideas with others: teachers, peers, whole class • showing more interest in mathematics, for example by doing more homework, working on extended tasks, commenting positively in evaluation tasks • being more willing and able to tackle routine, non-routine and unfamiliar tasks • looking for and expecting to find coherence in tasks; expecting mathematics to make sense • doing better than expected, or than comparison groups, on certain types of question in national and in-house tests • showing improvements in behaviour and attendance • Back to main presentation

21. Task 5: What did the research find out? (contd) The common principles that underpinned the teachers’ practices were: • all have a right of access to a broad mathematics curriculum; • all students should develop their reasoning and thinking in and through mathematics; • mathematics can be a source of self-esteem; • students have to become mathematical learners; • adolescents have to develop the ability to exercise rights and responsibilities of citizenship through mathematics; • teachers have to take account of reality. Read Section 8.3 to find out about each of these principles in more detail. Which of these principles underpin your practice? Give some examples.

22. It’s All Political Acknowledging that mathematical education is a political endeavour requires the mathematics education community to recognize that the reform movement should be situated in the context of the larger movement for social and political justice. (Kitchen 2003) At the moment, this lies within the broader movement around and within the Labour Party.

23. Pellino (2007) argues “the social world of school operates by different rules or norms than the social world these children live in”, and summarizes much of the literature on the effects of poverty by drawing our attention to some of the characteristics of children in poverty.

24. We take the students who have less to begin with and then systematically give them less in school. Haycock (2001)

25. Bishop and Nickson 1983 The effect of class upon mathematics learning has been studied by Mellin-Olsen. In order to succeed… the individual pupils’ background must be taken into account… If one gained knowledge of family background … it might become possible to help parents to play the role of the ‘good parent’. Research on the Social Context of Mathematics Education, 1983 Alan Bishop & Marilyn Nickson

26. Ernest 2016 • Mathematics is traditionally seen as neutral, the furthest removed from the arguments and controversy of politics and social life. • Critical mathematics argues that history, society, and politics have shaped mathematics—not only through its applications and uses but also through molding its concepts, methods, and even mathematical truth and proof, the very means of establishing truth. • Critical mathematics education also attacks the neutrality of the teaching and learning of mathematics, showing how these are value‐laden activities indissolubly linked to social and political life. Critical Mathematics Education. Theory, Praxis and Reality, 2016 Paul Ernest & Bharath Sriraman

27. Being Critical 2017 Diverse voices, scholarship, and practice are essential for understanding the complexities of inequity, striving for equitable mathematics learning opportunities, and working towards engaging in a more socially just society. These critical educators’ work empower students and teachers to disrupt the opportunity gap and become future leaders of our country. (Creating Balance in an Unjust World)

28. Doing Criticality 2017 • Bring together educators, researchers, parents, activists, and students to collectively discuss social justice and math education • Engage with critical community activity, e.g. through Momentum • Foster new and innovative partnerships and collaborations • Create a space to share resources, lesson plans, best practices, and other classroom materials • Develop structures for ongoing discussion and working groups about math and social justice • Organize a national voice in the debate over maths education reform • Plan actions, advocacy, future meetings, etc.

29. What is the C in CME? • The first challenge is to come up with a definition of CME with which we can all agree. • Being critical is difficult to define, because it depends on one’s own world view. • Criticality is a relative concept; what is unjust to some, is not unjust to others.

30. Being Moderately Critical • Moderate forms of criticality are probably the easiest to sign up to. They focus on fairness and equity. However, they tend to presume the continuance of the structural status quo, and do not explicitly recognise or relate to structural inequalities in society, which lie at the root of social injustice; they certainly do not challenge the existence of the status quo. Work in this tradition might typically work on classroom relationships, language, and assessment. • This form of social justice might easily be signed up to or even hijacked by neoconservatives, who recognise inequality but who want to avoid a questioning of the difficult social conditions which bring it about and the and potentially threatening challenges required to bring about change.

31. Being Liberally Critical • This does recognise structural inequalities. However with an acceptance that classrooms can be made more just within the existing structures. Liberal forms of social justice see relationships as a key feature in classroom interaction, and may go further and see a classroom as the main social organ. It would see this level as political because human life operates at the individual level and this is where power itself operates. • Hence the classroom becomes a political arena and politics is produced at the level of the individual in a small community. For example, it would see the politics of gender relationships and identities as constructed within classrooms. Sometimes this results in research based on the assumption that we only need to look at language or discourse as roots of oppression. I place both Foucault and post-structuralism within the liberal tradition.

32. Being Radically Critical • Recognises structural inequality and seeks to redress the ways in which inequality is built into existing practices. By changing these structures greater access to, and success with, mathematics can be possible for those groups of students who have been excluded from participating in mathematics. • Class stratification comes to be framed as ability which is then reified in pedagogical practices of ability grouping. This has to be opposed. • A radical view seeks to disrupt the ideology and change the practices that create and support structural inequities. Radical forms of social justice are somewhat more demanding politically (and emotionally) because they recognise relational inequality and structural inequality, social class and ideology.

33. A Radical Manifesto for the Future 1 • A narrow curriculum and a culture of assessment is driving away teachers, creating a recruitment and retention crisis. • Education is what empowers us all to realise our full potential. • Every child is unique, and a just education system will enable each to find their learning path through a wide choice of courses and qualifications. • The world’s most successful education systems use more continuous assessment, avoiding ‘teaching for the test’.

34. A Radical Manifesto for the Future 2 • Bring back teachers’ collective bargaining. • Give teachers more direct involvement in the curriculum. • Reduce teacher workloads by reducing monitoring and bureaucracy. • Stop money being wasted on inefficient free schools and grammar schools.

35. A Radical Manifesto for the Future 3 • Oppose any attempt to create academies. • Introduce free school meals for all primary school children. • Invest in measures to close the attainment gap between children from different backgrounds. • Reduce class sizes to less than 30 for all five-, six-, and seven- year-olds, and seek to extend in time.

36. A Radical Manifesto for the Future 4 • Engender positive, respectful social and pedagogic relationships with low SES pupils, to explicitly foster self-esteem and resilience in working with mathematics. • Treat low SES students to the same high expectations, with a demanding and rigorous mathematics curriculum that expects all pupils to succeed and understand. (But please, don’t mention “mastery”)

37. A Radical Manifesto for the Future 5 • Recognize and embrace the diversity in the student body, valuing the talents and abilities of low SES learners, encompassing a respect for different life worlds and their contributions to mathematics. Get to know the families, and provide differentiated support. • Create and use meaningful tasks involving inquiry and cooperative learning, where low SES learners have some control and responsibility.

38. Future Research 1 High SES pupils have a level of self-confidence very common in middle class discourses. Working class discourses tend to be located in more subservient dependency modes, accepting conformity and obedience. Middle class pupils live in families where there is more independence, more autonomy and creativity (Kohn, 1983)

39. Future Research 2 Furthermore, studies of parenting suggest different strategies are used in different class background. Low SES, working class parents are more directive, requiring more obedience. Middle class parents tend to be more suggestive and accommodating reason and discussion. (Lareau 2003). The middle classes grow up to expect and feel superior with more control over their lives.

40. Future Research 3 Do we recognise low SES children have a different outlook on life – and focus our curriculum on immediate directive tasks so as to reduce their anxiety and fit a curriculum around them? What Lubienski is at pains to suggest in her study is that she did not discover that low SES pupil could not experience feelings of empowerment in mathematics (Lubienski 2007, pp 20-21).

41. Future Research 4 • The current education system favours those whom it has always favoured, those of higher socio-economic status. • More affluent parents are more likely to have the informal knowledge and skill … to be able to decode and use marketized forms to their own benefit

42. Future Research 5 • The rich language of middle-class parents prepares children for the language they will encounter in school mathematics. • Working-class children encounter forms of language in the home environment different from that which they encounter in the school.

43. Future Research 6 • Middle-class children find the structure of classroom interactions familiar – they already have a large amount of linguistic capital from home. To working-class children the structure is much more confusing; • For working class pupils without substantial reconstruction of their familial culture, effective participation in the mathematics classroom is transitory and intangible, making access to mathematics and success difficult to achieve.

44. Future Research 7 Middle class pupils come to school already with a set of dispositions, forms of language which gives them an advantage because these are exactly the behaviours that schools and teachers are expecting and prioritise.

45. Whose Side Are you On? I'm bound to follow my conscienceAnd do whatever I canBut it'll take much more than the union lawTo knock the fight out of a working man Which side are you on, boys?Which side are you on? (Billy Bragg)

46. https://equitymathed.wordpress.com/2017/10/29/history-of-istandwithrochelle/https://equitymathed.wordpress.com/2017/10/29/history-of-istandwithrochelle/