Refusal as a democratic catalyst for mathematics education development
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Discussions about the connections between mathematics and democracy amongst the general populace have not been explicitly well rehearsed. A critical relationship with democracy for mathematics education may involve directing and redirecting its purposes. But, we ask, what if the ‘choice’ to not participate in experiences of mathematics education, or in its (re)direction, were itself also a critical relationship with mathematics education? What if this refusal and disobedience to the evocative power of mathematics were a democratic action? We argue that consideration of mathematics education for democracy and development must take seriously specific acts of refusal that directly confront the construction of inequality common in most development contexts. Globalisation and development discourses, via citizenship and nationalism, construct relationships with learners and mathematics education in very specific ways that delimit possibilities for egalitarianism and democratic action. But, might such action not be recognised, not as refusal to participate per se, but as a refusal to participate in mathematics education’s colonising and/or globalising neo-liberal gaze? In arguing for the opening of a position of radical equality, we introduce Jacques Rancière to mathematics education theory, noting that for Rancière emancipation is the intentional disregard for ideological narratives such as the ones produced by mathematics education discourses. Thus, we provoke serious reconsideration of the assumptions behind most school improvement and professional development projects, as well as mathematics education policies and practices framed by globalising development discourses, and in the process we challenge our colleagues to consider ‘refusal’ not as deficit or failure, but as a critical position of radical equality in relation to mathematics education.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it