The Regulation of Disciplinary Knowledge through Policy and Practice: making mathematical reasoning ‘reasonable’

This presentation explores how mathematical reasoning is produced and shaped through both curriculum policy initiatives at a national level and their translation in practice by teachers at school level. Our post-structural analysis shows how reasoning, rather than being a creative and politically neutral process through which pupils can make their own meaning, takes on a socially organised meaning associated with contemporary education. Far from freeing pupils to think, its meaning is altered, in practice, as a means to manage pupils’ thinking. This has profound implications for what children experience in classrooms, narrowing and normalising learning in ways which contradict the political rhetoric surrounding the purpose of school mathematics as a creative subject which will support future prosperity.