Concerns about quality mathematics education are often posed in terms of the types of mathematics that are worthwhile and valuable for both the student and society in general, and about how to best support students so that they can develop this mathematics. Concerns about equity are about who is excluded from the opportunity to develop quality mathematics within our current practices and systems, and about how to remove social barriers that systematically disadvantage those students. This collection of chapters summarises our learning about the achievement of both equity and quality agendas in mathematics education and to move forward the debate on their importance for the field.

In this book, nationally renowned scholars join classroom teachers to share equity-oriented approaches that have been successful with urban high school mathematics students. Compiling for the first time major research findings and practitioner experiences from Railside High School, the volume describes the evolution of a fundamentally different conception of learners and teaching. The chapters bring together research and reflection on teacher collaboration and professional community, student outcomes and mathematics classroom culture, reform curricula and pedagogy, and ongoing teacher development. Mathematics for Equity will be invaluable reading for teachers, schools, and districts interested in maintaining a focus on equity and improving student learning while making sense of the new demands of the Common Core State Standards. Book Features: Core principles of an equity-centered mathematics program. Examples of how to focus and organize the collaborative work of a math department to develop a shared pedagogy. Student experiences with an equity pedagogy that focuses on building perseverance, flexibility in thinking, and deep conceptual understanding. Connections between reconceptualizing learners and teaching, and achieving deep mathematics learning and equitable outcomes. Contributors include: Jo Boaler, Ilana Seidel Horn, Judith Warren Little, and Rachel Lotan. “Mathematics for Equity provides a kaleidoscopic view, in the voices of teachers, researchers, and students themselves, of one of the nation’s most ambitious and successful attempts at teaching mathematics for equity. It shows what it takes to create a climate that supports students and teachers in engaging in meaningful mathematical activity—and, alas, how vulnerable such environments are to the wrong kinds of ‘accountability.’ Read it and learn.” —Alan H. Schoenfeld, University of California at Berkeley “Want to fix what's wrong with mathematics instruction in your school? Read this book with your colleagues and do what it inspires you to do. Written by the brave teachers and former students who did it, as well as researchers.” —Phil Daro, writing team, Common Core Standards, Strategic Education Research Partnership

This book provides prospective and practicing teachers with research insights into the mathematical difficulties of students with learning disabilities and classroom practices that address these difficulties. This linkage between research and practice celebrates teachers as learners of their own students’ mathematical thinking, thus contributing an alternative view of mathematical progression in which students are taught conceptually. The research-based volume presents a unique collaboration among researchers in special education, psychology, and mathematics education from around the world. It reflects an ongoing work by members of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME) and the North American Chapter of the PME Working Groups. The authors of chapters in this book, who have been collaborating extensively over the past 7 years, are from Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

This book explores the connection between the ways people speak in mathematics classrooms and their opportunities to learn mathematics. The words spoken, heard, written and read in mathematics classrooms shape students’ sense of what mathematics is and of what people can do with mathematics. The authors employ multiple perspectives to consider the means for transformative action with respect to increasing opportunities for traditionally marginalized students to form mathematical identities that resonate with their cultural, social, linguistic, and political beings.

This book examines the current thinking on five critical social and political areas in mathematics education. It focuses on material conditions in teaching and learning, and details features of social life and their influence on mathematics teaching, learning and achievement. Following an introduction, the first section addresses equitable access and participation in quality mathematics education. It explores this issue in different contexts and from different ideological perspectives. The second section traces the emergence and development of the notion of activism in mathematics education in theory, in the literature, in research and in practice. The third section then moves on to explore current research on the political forces at work in identity, subjectivity and (dis)ability within mathematics education, showing how emphasis on language and discourse provides information for this research, and how new directions are being pursued to address the diverse material conditions that shape learning experiences in mathematics education. Economic factors behind mathematics achievement form the topic of section four, which examines the political dimensions of mathematics education through the influence of national and global economic structures. The final section addresses distribution of power and cultural regimes of truth, based on the premise that although often deemed apolitical, mathematics and mathematics education are highly political institutions in our society. The book concludes with a summary and recommendations for the future.

​​This volume gathers together twenty major chapters that tackle a variety of issues associated with equity in mathematics education along the dimensions of gender, culture, curriculum diversity, and matters of a biological nature. The pursuit of equity in mathematics education is an important concern in the history of the present. Since there is no doubt about the significant role of mathematics in almost every aspect of life, it means that all individuals regardless of sex, in any age range, and in whatever context need to be provided with an opportunity to become mathematically able. The publication of this Springer volume on equity in mathematics education is situated at a time when there is strong and sustained research evidence indicating the persistence of an equity gap in mathematics, which has now enabled the mathematics education community to engage in a discourse of access for all. The research studies that are reported and discussed in the volume have been drawn from an international group of distinguished scholars whose impressive, forward-looking, and thought-provoking perspectives on relevant issues incite, broaden, and expand complicated conversations on how we might effectively achieve equity in mathematics education at the local, institutional, and systemic levels. Further, the up-to-date research knowledge in the field that is reflected in this volume provides conceptual and practical outlines for mechanisms of change, including models, examples, and usable theories that can inform the development of powerful equitable practices and the mobilization of meaningful equity interventions in different contexts of mathematics education.​

The diversity of research in mathematics education has been addressed as both, a problem and a strength. When manifested through adherence to different intellectual roots and theoretical orientations, diversions constitute ‘refractions’ of mathematics education. The collection and analysis of empirical data in a study are by necessity refracted through the specific analytical lens employed, as well as the aim of the study itself. Refractions can also refer to looking at old phenomena through new lenses. The chapters in this book are refracted through philosophical, political, mathematical and personal lenses by distinguished authors in the field, addressing issues about the elusive experience of doing mathematics, purification of texts, refractions, mathematics and ethnomathematics, political messages in textbook tasks, mathematics education policy debate, the political in mathematics education research, philosophy and mathematics, meanings and representations, identity of mathematical modeling, and dilemmas in the teaching of calculus. An ancient Sanskrit adage states that Knowledge is something that grows when shared, but shrinks when hoarded. Academics engaged in the generation of new Knowledge are blessed with both the time and the freedom to engage in pursuits that allow for intellectual pleasure. As a phenomenon of the Zeitgeist many have succumbed to the increased corporatization of academic work, engaging in activities for monetary and self advancement purposes. Are there any real intellectuals left in academia, a là Adorno, Bourdieu, Chomsky, Foucault, among others? This Festschrift is dedicated to academics that don't bother with self promotion or aggrandizement of themselves or their ideas in simplistic terms.