Popular culture, professional discourse, and mathematics education in the 1980s.

Abstract

Recent educational discourse is analyzed, using sources drawn from academic literature in education, canonical literature of professional associations, newspapers and popular magazines, and works of mass culture, including television programs and films. The focus is on the decade of the 1980s. Ultimately, the study reconstructs educational discourse to demonstrate that it is the interplay of power and knowledge that forms the experience of the participants and establishes their identities. Mathematics education is used as an 'extreme case', since mathematics is the discipline most easily accepted as separable from politics, ethics or the social construction of knowledge. Research in this area has tended to focus on classroom activities, optimal sequence of topics, or individual cognitive development. It has therefore inadvertently tended to construct a stark, unsustainable distinction between school mathematics and the world outside of schools. In doing so, the literature has typically displaced popular and mass culture, the public space, and related sites of power and politics, or has excluded them altogether. The juxtaposition of popular culture, public discourse and professional practice enables an examination of the production and mediation (and hence the ideological function) of such inappropriate distinctions. As a philosophical inquiry, this project develops the machinery necessary to analyze ways in which school knowledge mediates the production of Platonic, rational conceptions of knowing and the ongoing everyday practice of knowing and acting both inside and outside of schools. As an historical inquiry, this inquiry examines how persistent, pre-critical assumptions about the neutrality of knowledge and school knowledge become 'truths' through their constant exercise in practice. These 'truths' sustain, in turn, conceptual schemes that divide awarenesses of socially mediated power and knowledge from each other. Finally, as a sociocultural inquiry, the dissertation calls for a discourse that merges research and practice while discarding unnecessary distinctions among popular culture, professional discourse and pedagogical encounters.