Chapter 9: Mathematics Education: For Whom?

The relation between researchers and education is much more than a simple professional connection. The praxis of researcher in the educational process goes beyond research practices—we have other roles in the world as educators: the roles of parents, of teachers, and as students in our own researcher’s practices. I take as my task to focus on the role of the mathematics education process in relation to our multiple identities, questioning ourselves, mainly searching to realize the strong relations that exist between mathematical education and school:

In my case, I am reacting to the appearance of feelings about my roles as teacher but still as researcher and mother, and the awareness of the role of school in society at large, planting and cultivating the hegemony in the actual societies. I could feel some changes as teacher, researcher, and mother in the relation between school and me but these changes are at a level to contribute different strategies to maintain the order that exists in our hegemonic society. The lack of connection between the school and the process of knowledge, as a collective work, that I could feel as teacher, researcher, and mother gave me support to ask myself about my active role as a critic of the system that I am constructing and that constructs me. Do I want it? What does education mean? Do I agree with this order of the power of corporification¹ and of the ethic of identification maintained by the school institution?