Chapter 3: Mathematics Education Ideologies and Globalization

In this chapter I tell two tales. One is a tale of the role of ideology in the globalization of mathematics, science, and technology education research, and its social and political implications. The other thinner tale is the story of my personal situatedness within the intellectual and material worlds I inhabit. To critique the globalization of educational research in these domains without acknowledging my situatedness and the boundaries of my complicity would be only half of the story, and would lack reflexivity and the necessary acknowledgement of the complexity of the issues involved.

Postmodernity has adopted Bacon's (1597/1997) insight that knowledge is power and exploited it in the knowledge economy. My aim is to partly subvert this order and, through providing a lens that reveals some of the ideologies at work in educational research, to offer knowledge workers a tool for carrying their endeavours forward and resisting or harnessing some of the forces at play in globalization.