Abstract
In 2003, Jill Adler and Stephen Lerman published a chapter entitled “Getting the description right and making it count: Ethical practice in mathematics education research”. They use the context of mathematics education in southern Africa to illuminate and open up a conversation about the ethical, methodological and political challenges faced by researchers in this and other similar contexts. These challenges relate to defining what counts as a problem in mathematics education, making the research “count” both locally for the participants and more broadly for the mathematics education community, and producing descriptions that are “right” in the sense that they are rigorous, valid, comprehensive and respectful. In this chapter we review how Jill has responded to these challenges in her own research over the past 20 years. We ask: How does respect for practice, democracy, truth and persons play out in her research descriptions? Are they right? For whom and how do they come to count? We also draw on our own research histories of working with Jill to reflect on how her research practice has impacted the postgraduate supervision space.
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Notes
- 1.
Adler and Lerman (2003) express unease with their use, in the absence of better alternative, of the terms developed and developing to describe differences across countries. In this chapter we choose to use the terms political North and political South proposed by Janks (2010). These terms keep in view the histories that have produced the differences.
- 2.
The Chairs in Mathematics Education are a private-public partnership aimed at improving teacher education and learner performance in South Africa.
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le Roux, K., Mwakapenda, W., Pournara, C., Chitera, N., Pillay, V., Tobias, B. (2016). Defining the Problems of Mathematics Education, Getting the Description Right and Making It Count: Jill Adler’s Contribution and Beyond. In: Phakeng, M., Lerman, S. (eds) Mathematics Education in a Context of Inequity, Poverty and Language Diversity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38824-3_8
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