Filling gaps: assessment software and the production of mathematics and its teaching and learning in primary schools

Alderton, Julie; Pratt, Nick

doi:10.1080/17508487.2021.1917435

Cited by 5 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…We are interested in these micro-level negotiations of meanings “that can account for the differing ways in which individuals struggle to create, appropriate and transform discourse” (Thomas and Davies, 2005, p. 684). Following the word “impact” locally, what it means, the discourses it operates in, how it is contested, how it might be contested further in the post-pandemic context, may help us better understand and recognize what is at stake for humanities researchers and doctoral education in relation to the politics of the impact agenda (Alderton and Pratt, 2021; Wright, 2019).…”

Section: A Context Of Societal Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living with the impact agenda – humanities academics negotiating and resisting the impact agenda as researchers and doctoral supervisors

Skov,

Bengtsen

2024

SGPE

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Purpose In Denmark, there has been, over decades, an intensified political focus on how humanities research and doctoral education contribute to society. In this vein, the notion of impact has become a central part of the academic language, often associated with terms like use, effects and outputs, stemming from neoliberal ideologies. The purpose of this paper is to explore how humanities academics are living with the impact agenda, as both experienced researchers and as doctoral supervisors educating the next generation of researchers in this post-pandemic era. Specifically, the authors are interested in the supervisor-researcher relationship, that is, the relationship between how the supervisors navigate the impact agenda as researchers and then the way they tell their doctoral students to do likewise. Design/methodology/approach The authors have studied how the impact agenda is accommodated by humanities academics through a series of qualitative interviews with humanities researchers and humanities PhD supervisors, encompassing questions of how they are living with the expectation of impact and how it is embedded in their university and departmental context. Findings The study shows that there is no link between how the supervisors navigate the impact agenda in relation to their own research work and then the way they tell their doctoral students to approach it. Within the space of their own research, the supervisors engage in resistance practices towards the impact agenda in terms of minimal compliance, rejection or resignation, whereas in the space of supervision, the impact agenda is re-inscribed to embody other understandings. The supervisors want to protect their students from this agenda, especially in the knowledge that many of them are not going to stay in academia due to limited researcher career possibilities. Furthermore, the paper reveals a new understanding of the impact agenda as having a relational quality, and in two ways. One is through a positional struggle, the reshaping of power relations, between universities (or academics) and society (or the state and the market); the other is as a phenomenon very much lived among academics themselves, including between supervisors and their doctoral students within the institutional context. Originality/value This study opens up the impact agenda, showing what it means to be a humanities academic living with the effects of the impact agenda and trying to navigate this. The study is mapping and tracking out the many different meanings and variations of impact in all its volatility for academics concerned about it. In current, post-pandemic times, when manifold expectations are directed towards research and doctoral education, it is important to know more about how these expectations affect and are dealt with by those who are expected to commit to them.

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Section: A Context Of Societal Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

Living with the impact agenda – humanities academics negotiating and resisting the impact agenda as researchers and doctoral supervisors

Skov,

Bengtsen

2024

SGPE

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“…They appeal to common‐sense logic—after all, who would not want pupils to master things?—a clear end‐goal—mastery—and a sense of orderliness. It is in the professional logic of such ideas that a regime of practices starts to be generated in which ‘some directions of thought, perhaps implicit and inductive, seem to flow more easily, affording, rather than constraining, certain actions over others’ (Alderton & Pratt, 2022, p. 503). We now develop this analysis of how such a regime is constituted by examining the origins and associations of the word mastery itself as it appears in the English context.…”

Section: The Case Of Masterymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In TfM the notion of readiness to progress accentuates this idea, assuming that there are mathematical objects to master which are definitively, not arbitrarily, ‘the most important conceptual knowledge and understanding that pupils need as they progress from year 1 to year 6’ (Department for Education, 2020, p. 5—as above). This formation of knowledge affords the kinds of teaching techniques, vocabulary, assessment technologies (Alderton & Pratt, 2022; Pratt & Alderton, 2019) and so on used to govern schooling and acts as a commodity in the economy of educational success.…”

Section: Assumptions In Tfmmentioning

confidence: 99%

The policy and practice of mathematics mastery: The effects of neoliberalism and neoconservatism on curriculum reform

Pratt

Alderton

2023

The Curriculum Journal

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This paper explores how the twin processes of neoliberalism and neoconservatism work together on, and through, curricula and their associated pedagogies. It bridges the gap between policy and classroom practice, focusing on the particular example of the school subject of mathematics and the notion of mastery, operationalised in the English education system as Teaching for Mastery (TfM). From this context, it develops a theoretical argument using Dean's analytics of government as part of a broader Foucauldian frame, to analyse how TfM is constructed as a particular policy truth. It then shifts the analysis from a wide, social one to the individual classroom level using a psychological argument to critique TfM in its own terms, examining the onto-epistemological nature of mathematics as a subject. In doing so, it explores ways in which mastery might be problematic in classrooms, even whilst appearing to offer a solution at policy level to long-standing problems in English schooling. The aim is not to suggest that TfM has nothing to offer, but to point to ways in which it draws on the psychology of teaching and learning in a very particular manner, inscribing pupils with very specific mathematical subjectivities. By providing this insight into how neoliberal policy positions play out at practitioner level via curricula and pedagogies, the paper raises questions which are philosophical, political, and ethical, regarding the potential effect of TfM on teachers' and pupils' experiences of mathematics

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“…And the wider aim in doing so is to challenge the normalising role of mathematics education research whose "efforts are often predicated on raising standards in a competitive environment to ensure adequate capability across the population but possibly rather less on wider inclusion across the spectrum of educational needs and aspirations" (p. 9). Moreover, and reflecting our own interests too (Alderton & Pratt, 2021), Brown also wishes to focus researchers on the "choice [that] needs to be made as to the sort of mathematical activity that is worth living" (p. 6).…”

Section: A Contemporary Theory Of Mathematics Education Research By T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Review of “A contemporary theory of mathematics education research”

Pratt

Alderton

2022

Research in Mathematics Education

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Filling gaps: assessment software and the production of mathematics and its teaching and learning in primary schools

Cited by 5 publications

References 27 publications

Living with the impact agenda – humanities academics negotiating and resisting the impact agenda as researchers and doctoral supervisors

Living with the impact agenda – humanities academics negotiating and resisting the impact agenda as researchers and doctoral supervisors

The policy and practice of mathematics mastery: The effects of neoliberalism and neoconservatism on curriculum reform

Review of “A contemporary theory of mathematics education research”

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