Towards the next 21 years of Research in Mathematics Education

In our editorial for volume 21 issue 1 (Jones, Black, & Coles, 2019) we looked back over the previous 21 years of Research in Mathematics Education (RME) to celebrate its growth and development and the range of innovative research it has published. We would like to take the opportunity of this editorial to look forward and consider possible future developments over the next 21 years. We are engaging Editorial Board members in discussion about future directions for RME and would welcome ideas and inputs from readers also, via the RME email address.

One source of thinking about the future is to look at past trends and gaps. The executive committee of the British Society for Research into Learning Mathematics (BSRLM) commissioned a review of the writing within their day conference proceedings, to cover the period 2003–2017 (Marks, Barclay, Barnes, & Treacy, 2019). The gaps in research identified included mathematics education and: early years schooling; adult education; and, students with special educational needs and disabilities. Methodologically, the authors called for a continuation of the innovation they observed and, in particular, efforts to scale up small-scale empirical research. Marks et al., also called on BSRLM to consider its role in supporting practitioner-research and how its research could be disseminated more effectively to a teacher audience. We would like to endorse these recommendations in the sense of encouraging research submissions from those areas identified and also welcoming discussion of how RME could reach more teachers.

The second source of our consideration of the future is more speculative and links, for us, to an increasingly urgent sense that mathematics education needs to take account of a world that is facing unprecedented crises of climate, ecology, migration and more. In the last issue of volume 21, Barquero, Bosch, and Gascón (2019) compared different possible approaches to a research problem (the particular problem they considered related to the teaching of modelling at university). In their conclusion they considered the “ecological” dimension of approaches to research, which they related to the “conditions and constraints” (p. 327) that either allow or hinder the existence of particular practices within particular institutions in the first place. The authors comment that “This dimension is rarely considered in mathematics education” (ibid). The notion of ecology being invoked here has obvious political dimensions. In a related move, Skovsmose (2019) calls on mathematics educators to be ready to address crises (both local and global), including ones that may not be obvious or may even be deliberately ignored, and to look at them from a variety of perspectives. He goes on to list some of the ways in which this could be done. We hope that RME can continue to be a venue for writing from scholars who are grappling with issues raised in this paragraph. It is hard to imagine what the world might be like in 21 years from now, let alone the fate of mathematics education, e.g. in what ways, if at all, will mathematics continue to be taught? Change seems inevitable and we would like to encourage debate and research in mathematics education that helps us think about a future that is not what it was.