Mathematical moments: Autoethnographic excursions with a mathematical outsider sociologist

In this essay I offer some reflections on the field of mathematics education, and particularly the sociopolitical analysis of mathematics education that has emerged in contemporary scholarship. Here I attempt to do two things. First of all I respond to a recent book on “disorder” in mathematics education, identifying some themes and problematics that I find intriguing and generative from my perspective outside the field. Here I reflect on the way that mathematics is positioned in educational discourse generally as a proxy for human capital and general intelligence. Next I relate stories from my life and practice as a primary school teacher in which mathematics, as I understood it, bumped productively against problems in everyday life. Finally, I conclude with a reflection on the productive tension between naïve place-based mathematical understandings and abstract context-bridging mathematical knowledge forms.