Chapter 9: The Ethics of Disruption

This chapter will explore the many ways in which our projects acted as a catalyst for disruption. The process of negotiating uncertain territory (see Chapter 8) impacted on participants, on funders, on how we packaged the research to share it with others and ultimately on our own thinking as researchers. In this chapter, we consider whether our projects should be described as research or as intervention, or as both. We reflect on the potential of such projects to disrupt our thinking and through that disruption help us to reframe our understanding of the field.

As highlighted in earlier chapters, our projects were not directly focussed on pupil attainment or curriculum mathematics. In the process of developing the projects, we had to work hard to shift children's and parents' expectations about the nature of mathematics: these expectations were based on experiences of school mathematics. Our projects focussed on mathematical thinking that was inherent in everyday activity: we have explained in previous chapters how this differs from the school curriculum. Nonetheless, schools were still interested in being involved in our projects because of the potential for the activities to support children's learning in the classroom. Schools acted as gatekeepers, supporting our access to participants. This meant that participants were likely to frame their expectations about the projects with reference to school. We needed, therefore, to make concerted efforts to position the projects to participants as ‘not-school mathematics’, as we have discussed in previous chapters.