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Abstract
This final article of the special issue looks back on our work on the ESRC projects, especially Keeping Open the Door to Mathematically-Demanding Courses in Further and Higher Education (published here and elsewhere), and looks forward to that of the ‘Transmaths’ projects under way – a collection of work on post-compulsory mathematics education during adolescence. I argue that this phase of mathematics education is dominated by two factors. First, there is the ‘value’ of mathematics to the learner and to society at large, which shapes all choices, decisions and strategies. Second, there is the fact of adolescence and the special demands on mathematics education this poses, for theoretical thinking, for identity, and for relationships. In our project, we adopted mixed methods approaches to capturing the ‘whole person’ of the mathematics learner (and teacher): their sense of self and motivation, their disposition to learn mathematics, and their mathematics self-efficacy. The key contradiction that emerges is that, between the use and exchange value of mathematical knowledge, whether for the learner, the teacher, the institution, or wider society and culture. I discuss the prospects for a theory of value in Activity theory and in Bourdieu's sociology.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge the support of the ESRC-TLRP programme of research into widening participation, for Keeping Open the Door to Mathematically-Demanding Courses in Further and Higher Education programmes (RES-139-25-0241) and the support of the ESRC for the ‘Transmaths’ projects: Mathematics Learning, Identity and Educational Practice: the Transition into Post-Compulsory Education (RES-000-22-2890) and Mathematics Learning, Identity and Educational Practice: the Transition into Higher Education (RES-062-23-1213).
Notes
1. The Educational and Social Economic Research Council (ESRC) is the UK's social research council that funds academic research in the social sciences, including Education. The ESRC, using university sponsorship, fund the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) to conduct educational research in teaching and learning for over ten years in multiple phases, including one on Widening Participation in Higher Education in 2005–08. See http://www.tlrp.org
2. This paper reports the association between teachers’ self-reported pedagogic practice (on a scale from low to high ‘transmissionism’) and the associated decline in students’ disposition to study more mathematics in Higher Education.
3. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics have come to be grouped as ‘STEM’ in the formulation of a political agenda involving government funding priorities, as these subjects are seen to reflect industrial needs and priorities, notwithstanding the increasingly apparent societal need for understanding the economic, social and political spheres.
5. Prior to 2009, the key indicator of success for a learner at the end of compulsory schooling used in all league tables was to have scored at grade C on at least 5 GCSE subjects. The government decided to change the criterion so that the 5 subjects had to include a grade C in both mathematics and English. As the hardest subject to obtain, mathematics therefore became the source of great value, and in some places resources have been significantly diverted to try to optimise mathematics grade C outcomes where learners ‘needed them’ to make the school a ‘success’.