Identity positioning and discursive construction

Mendick (2006) extends Walkerdine’s arguments to interrogate how hegemonic discourses continue to construct gender within and through a matrix that relies on oppositional binaries of ‘masculine’ (for example rational, logical, objective) at the expense of the ‘feminine’ (for example collaboration, team work and negotiation). Solomon (2012) and Mendick (2005, 2006), like Coben (2000) - who theorises within a field specific to adults returning to the classroom to learn mathematics through the SfL intervention - focus on ‘invisibleness’ within the mathematical domain. In contrast

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to Coben’s socio-cultural theorising on the invisible and gendered nature of

mathematics within the everyday domain, these authors interrogate the manifestations of gendered dialects of mathematics. They argue that it is only through interrogating the ways in which the social world directly causes gendered behaviours that it

becomes possible to deconstruct how women (Solomon, 2007, 2010, 2012; Mendick, 2005; Mendick et al., 2000, 2008, 2010) and men (Mendick, 2006) become compelled “to ‘do’ identity work … [to] belong’ in the world of mathematics” (Solomon, 2012: 175).

Mendick, Epstein & Hollingworth (2000) and Mendick, Epstein, & Moreau (2008) investigated the gendered imbalances of participation rates, and used an imaginative and provocative montage of theoretical lenses to collect data and theorise the impact of media discourses on learners' relationships with mathematics. The Mathematical Images and Gender Identities project (Mendick et al., 2008), compared and contrasted stories from 14 and 15 year olds (Years 10 and 11 in the UK) to stories of learning mathematics from second and third year university undergraduate students. The research was extensive and developed a stratified sample; by educational

achievement, class, gender and race. The findings of this project were used to inform the final report to the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science Engineering and Technology (Epstein, Mendick & Moreau, 2010), which investigated the gendering of representations of mathematics and mathematicians in popular culture, and the

influences of these discourses on young/adult learners.

The data collection included a survey, a textual archive, focus groups and semi-

structured individual interviews. The incorporation of a textual archive was integral to the data collection methodology, and this marked a departure from the previously mentioned studies (Swan & Swain, 2007; Brown et al., 1999, 2001, 2006), which focused on mathematical practices within the classroom. The authors of the

Mathematical Images and Gender Identities research project (Mendick et al., 2000, 2008) asked participants to arrange a series of images of people and mathematics in order of likeability, and then to arrange a second series of images of mathematical artefacts in terms of math-ness’. The use of different images allowed the authors to cross ontological (who is a mathematician) and epistemic (what is mathematics)

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boundaries within the interview spaces, and the responses they achieved hinted at the complexities and contradictions of social constructions of mathematics and

mathematicians. Whilst the sampling methods mirrored the design-based paradigm of TTM in ways refreshingly similar to Brown and McNamara, the authors foregrounded their analysis on the productive power of discourses and the ambiguities, contestations and complexities inherent within the messiness of identities, participation and

relationships with mathematics:

Our main focus here is on the discourses about mathematics and mathematicians that prevail in popular culture and the ways in which young people deploy them and negotiate their way through them in making their choices and producing themselves as (non)mathematicians. We see these discourses operating as regimes of truth, not because of their power to describe reality but because of their power to produce it (Moreau, Mendick & Epstein, 2010: 45).

The authors found that the complexities, divisions, and contradictions of the

participants’ narratives hinted at a general critical awareness of the clichéd nature of mathematical representations in popular culture. But, simultaneously, their stories also revealed how these participants readily drew on what they knew to be clichéd

accounts to sustain their sense of mathematics and their mathematical identities (Mendick et al., 2008). Interestingly for this thesis, for participants categorised as holding “poor relationships with the subject” (Mendick et al., 2008: 25), the

discussions of mathematics tended to be restricted to number calculations and set in a binary comparison against more ‘creative’ subjects such as language and art. As these participants organised the pictures, they tended to use a discursive ranking of

‘otherness’ and references to mathematics within the esoteric domain. Stories about ‘mathematicians’ tended to be positioned as simply different to ‘normal’ people and for those with a poor relationship with the subject. For those participants who did not identify as ‘good’ at mathematics, this research revealed how 'doing' mathematical thinking required considerable “identity work” (Mendick, 2006) in order that they could acknowledge their achievements.

The participants studying mathematics at a higher level tended to use similar identity markers. However, in contrast, they tended to identify with the ‘commitment’ to and/or what they assumed to be the devotion required, to grapple with (and overcome) demanding mathematical knowledge (Mendick et al., 2000, 2008). These stories

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tended to centre on personal uses of mathematics in ways that were suggestive of an identity of being a mathematician. Participants with a stronger relationship with mathematics were less frightened by the connotations of mathematical brilliance and of being perceived as socially inept or living with mental illness (Mendick et al., 2008). The authors concluded that whilst “those not choosing mathematics tended to “dis-identify” with identity markers of mathematicians and mobilised language such as ‘weird’” … the participants displaying more “positive” relationships … tended to present a different account of ‘the mathematical’ within popular culture” (Mendick & Moreau, 2014: 24). Mendick et al. mobilised a Foucauldian approach to reveal the ways in which power was intrinsic to the production of a discursive network and interrogated the ways in which gendered trajectories of doing mathematics and being a mathematician ran through the fabric of the wider social milieu. For the authors, to come to new understandings about the processes of subjectivity and subjectification, it was important to make the distinction between reasons given for particular choices and the ways in which these choices were articulated.

Through the use of storytelling, this research revealed how individuals who identified as (non)mathematicians invested in not being a mathematician. In ways similar to Brown et al. (1991, 2001) - and polarising Swan and Swains’ (2007, 2010) discourses of pedagogic practice - the authors concluded by problematising the contemporary assumption of a ‘natural’ desirability associated with acquiring mathematical status amongst peers including in the workplace. In summary, this research found that participants’ relationships with mathematics were gendered, classed, and raced and consistently found that relationships with mathematics were indicative of the ways in which social differences are re/produced. They concluded that incorporating

references to popular culture could discursively produce spaces for the discussions of social justice in the classroom. Central to the discussion threads of this thesis, these authors put forward the argument that discussions should not be restricted to affect and meta-cognition. They demonstrated how research needed to be widened to reveal the hidden gendered, classed and raced practices of mathematics.

Black et al. (2009) and Mendick et al (2009) continue to demonstrate that the

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classroom. Walkerdine created a space for researchers to theorise the effects of power, discursive formation and the psychic investments in (non)mathematical identities. This has sustained a methodological pathway that enables me to engage with the academic debate that focuses on gendered discourses that subject learners to particular kinds of schooling practices. As Walkerdine (1998: 16) wrote:

Our research becomes a process of disentangling, of pulling ourselves free of the web. It is like unpicking knitting, the wool still bearing the imprint of the knots that formed into a garment. The garment often seemed to fit us well and even keep us warm on winter nights. Taking it apart is painful and does not reveal the easy certainty of answers…. But there have been so many easy answers which told us what was wrong … and how to put it right. … We want to tell a different story of fact, fiction and fantasy.

2.6 Summary

At the start of this PhD journey, I was motivated by the idea of listening to the learners describe, and teachers discuss, good practice. To do so would rely on a Humanist assumption that disconnects the known from the knower. With this realisation, I moved towards a critical analysis of the ways in which key actors consume the dominant neo-liberal discourses of professionalism, standards and good practice, and the ways in which this particular sample of learner participants took up, negotiated, and resisted these discourses within and through the stories of their

encounters with mathematics. This is an original research trajectory for the sector, but falls within a well-established wider body of work that examines the post-structuralist ‘turn’ in mathematics education. By venturing into the post-structuralist domain, I create a discursive space that seeks to unsettle the taken-for-granted assumptions about the coherence of the learner as a rational and autonomous agent on which current practices are based. By acknowledging research, mathematics and

mathematics education to be uncertain, ambiguous, fragile processes that are at best “jerky, episodic and as beset with loss as much as gain” (Bibby, 2011: 58), I have troubled my previous understandings of 'performance' in the classroom.

In conclusion, this thesis intends to reveal the ways in which the participants constructed mathematics as unyielding, exacting and hard, and to come to new understandings of why it is these very qualities that many of the participants fought

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the hardest to protect. Whilst starting from different positions, in mobilising

Foucault’s “politics of refusal” (Gedalof, 2003: 94) alongside Lacan’s understanding of demand within the symbolic realm, it becomes possible to extend the debate in new and exciting ways. I intend to weave threads from this body of literature to support my own theoretical arguments, to gain new understandings of the multiple contexts in which the participants (both learners and teachers) negotiated and reworked their (non)mathematical identities in and between the dominant public discourses of numeracy, the numerate citizen and of mathematics. The next chapter provides an outline for mobilising the principle theoretical tools mobilised within this thesis, ending with justification for a post structural turn in analysis.

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