Abstract:

In the view of social justice, mathematics education should provide equal access to learning to all individuals regardless of ethnicity, social class and gender. It should also be considered that teachers who teach mathematics play an important role in children's school mathematical performance. Both their educational approaches and the learning opportunities they provide their students with, are significantly influenced by their perceptions, beliefs and attitudes about mathematics teaching and learning. Thus, this paper focuses on how mathematics is constructed both as a discipline and as a school subject in the discourse of 14 teachers who teach mathematics in secondary schools of a semi-urban city in Greece. Research data were collected through semi-structured interviews, followed by a Foucauldian analysis of the teachers’ discourse. The analysis of data reveals that the teachers use the discourse of biology, as well as a series of dipoles, to construct mathematics as a subject which is identified with intelligence and as one which has a higher prestige than philology courses. In addition, for the participant teachers mathematics is a universal language of interpreting the world while at the same time it is considered a masculine subject, inaccessible and detached from reality. The above discourses about mathematics function as technologies of power and define possibilities, limits, opportunities and ways of being for all children and especially girls. In this way, they affect the inclusion or exclusion of individuals, especially girls, from mathematical education.

Keywords:

Mathematics education, construction of mathematics, teachers’ discourse, equality.