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In proposing that mathematics pedagogy limits and regulates epistemological legitimacy, the chapter raises thorny questions about the assumption that mathematical knowledge is co-constructed and shared through respectful exchanges between a teacher and her students. In the proposal, questions of differential power and privilege figure centrally. The approach that conceives of mathematics as constructed, situated within institutions, historical moments as well as social, cultural and discursive spaces signals dilemmas in relation to the question of who qualifies as knowing mathematics. Once school mathematics is conceptualized as a political and ethical project—a conceptualization that simultaneously disavows the possibility of utopian transformation—questions of epistemic responsibility come to the fore. The chapter"s response is to offer a praxis that attends to failures and refusals. In the slippage from taken-for-granted truths about underachievement amongst specific groups of students, Foucault"s ethics of the self asks: How are learners constituted as moral subjects of their own actions? What his work makes possible is a politics which embraces a recognition of the multiple and contradictory aspects of both our individual and collective beings.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-77760-3_10

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