Richard Barwell

While there are several studies analysing how mathematics education is portrayed in news media discourses, there has been little examination of the construction of different stakeholders (e.g. teachers, parents, curricula). In this paper, we report our analysis of a corpus of Canadian newspaper reports on mathematics education, focusing on the underlying construction of different stakeholders. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of regimes of truth, we show how news media construct a “truth” that portrays different stakeholders as either actors or acted-ons working for or against individual or national mathematical performance. We explain these findings with reference to the general media framing of mathematics education in the corpus.

This article presents the results of an analysis of ethnographic data collected in three second language mathematics classrooms in Canada. The elementary school classes consisted of a group of indigenous students, a group of new immigrant students and a class in a French immersion programme. The focus of the analysis was on the sources of meaning students use in mathematics classrooms. The notion of sources of meaning is framed by a Bakhtinian perspective on language, in which they are examined in terms of discourses, voices and languages. For one student in each class, I describe a repertoire of sources of meaning and discuss similarities and differences relating to the sociolinguistic context of each class. Students’ repertoires are shown to include both situational and distal sources of meaning. The relationship between distal and situational sources of meaning reflects the stratified nature of mathematics classroom interaction.