Mapping Social Constructions and Complexities

Abstract

This section gathers 11 chapters with contributions from Australia, Germany, Lebanon, Malawi, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The chapters address issues concerning quality and equity as well as their relationships, and highlight particular dimensions of what I would call the social and political constitution of the discourses of equity and quality in mathematics education. As a whole, the chapters offer a mapping of the multiple influences that in a diversity of sites of practice shape the ways of talking, viewing and enacting both quality and equity. The chapters illustrate with empirical material, analysis and discussions, the way in which the discourses of equity and quality move in constant construction and recontextualization from broad societal trends to the constitution of subjectivities, passing through policy, the media, pedagogy and reaching the learners. I will comment on the chapters knitting a network of discursive relationships between the issues raised by the authors. My intention is to articulate my reading of how these chapters map the discursive complexity of equity and quality in mathematics education in society nowadays.