Bokens kapitel utgör viktiga bidrag i en kritisk granskning av svenskmatematikutbildning utifrån sociopolitiska samhällsperspektiv. Motbakgrund av bokens olika kapitel belyser vi upplevelser och konsekvenser av att konstrueras som den andre i svensk matematikutbildning.Med hjälp av begreppet andrafiering synliggör vi författare till dettakapitel tillsammans ’dom andra’ och deras erfarenheter i relation tillmigration och matematikutbildning. Vi som författat detta kapitel, tvånyutexaminerade lärare och två forskare, har därför ingått en så kalladallians. Vårt kapitel visar hur matematikutbildning bidrar till processerav andrafiering och skapandet av den andra och hur dessa processerpåverkar flerspråkiga elevers och lärarstudenters identitetsskapandeoch därmed även deras möjligheter att lära matematik. Flerspråkighetbehöver synliggöras och normaliseras. Alla elevers och lärarstudentersspråk och kulturer måste få ta plats, inte som exotiska inslag av kulturella uttryck utan som en del av den ordinarie matematikutbildningen. 

Background: The focus on translanguaging practices in multilingual classrooms canbe seen, by and large, as responding to risks of violence entailed in diverse contextsof language use, including the teaching and learning of mathematics. However, thepractice of translanguaging alone cannot counteract the hegemonic authority ofmonolingual and monologic curricula being present through interactions amongteachers, students, and researchers, as well as material resources.Purpose: Drawing on Bakhtin’s philosophy of language, we discuss dialogicalityas a critical and democratic organizing principle for the pervasive polyphony thatcharacterizes every utterance constituting heteroglossia. Dialogicality reconstitutesour relation to language through the “other” and the need to see any utterance as anonteleological process among subjects and objects. As such, the aim is to explorehow acts of dialogicality may address the potential risks of onto/epistemic violence intranslanguaging practices. Focusing on either emergent or orchestrated translanguagingin three European states: Greece, Catalonia and Sweden, we discuss how dialogicalityallows for alternative accounts of language use in complex classroom events.Method: Methodologically, we start by encountering the sociopolitical contextof monolingual and monologic curricula in Europe, where the three cases wetheorize take place, along with our considerations for dialogicality in the realm oftranslanguaging. Our theorizing-in-practice unfolds a double effort in reading. First,what can we read today as risks of onto/epistemic violence in each of these cases?1Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden2Autonomous University, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain3Malmö University, Malmö, SwedenCorresponding Author:Anna Chronaki, Malmö University, Skåne County, Malmö 205 06, Sweden.Email: anna.chronaki@mau.se1104040TCZXXX10.1177/01614681221104040Teachers College RecordChronaki et al.research-article2022  Chronaki et al. 109And second, what is the potential of dialogic translanguaging across the cases andwithin the boundaries of state monolingual policy and monologic discursive cultureof school mathematics?Findings: The present article contributes by discussing dialogicality as a relationalonto/epistemology toward addressing translanguaging practices. Concerning thefirst question, our theorizing-in-practice shares evidence of the inevitable presenceof onto/epistemic violence in every utterance. The limited scope of a crudemathematisation process through language appears continuously in mathematicsclassrooms, serving to place either the object or the subject into fixed narratives.Regarding the second question, our dialogical reading of translanguaging denotes theimportance of the importance of minor responding(s) to such moments of violentrisk. We understand them as “cracks” in the authoritative status of monolingual andmonologic mathematics curricula; we argue that such minor, yet crucial, cracks areof great significance for creating acts of dialogicality from “below,” disrupting thehegemonic authority of an assumed neutral mathematical language.Conclusions/Recommendations: The risk of onto/epistemic violence is inevitablein any discursive and embodied encounter in multilingual mathematics classrooms,including the translanguaging practices. The study suggests that acts of dialogicalitybecome minor responses to violence in ways that both counteract oppressivemonologic discourse and open toward a relational onto/epistemology withmathematics, children, teachers, material resources, and researchers. Rememberinghow Bakhtin insisted that “language is never unitary” and “dialogue” is not a panacea,we emphasize the need for a continuous focus on creating acts of dialogicality withlanguage and discourse.

The purpose of the interdisciplinary project is to generate knowledge about the pedagogical potentials and limitations of multilingual practices in mathematics and science education. We specifically aim to explore and problematise how multilingual approaches and activities may promote mathematics and science teaching and learning in school years 4–9. The qualitative project is conducted by an interdisciplinary research team that integrates theories from educational research in didactics, sociology and linguistics, including translanguaging theories. The project’s four-year period comprises initial exploration of existing pedagogical practices, mainly through workshops with teachers, classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers, in four culturally and linguistically diverse schools. This explorative phase is followed by a two-year period of pedagogical interventions, in which teachers and researchers together design, carry out and analyse classroom interventions. The interventions involve exploring the pedagogical potentials and limitations for promoting multilingual resources for teaching and learning. Further, students’ identities as engaged learners of mathematics and science are explored. Our ambition is for the project to contribute with new and multifaceted knowledge on the complexity of teaching and learning in multilingual mathematics and science classrooms in mainstream compulsory schools in which the students have a variety of language backgrounds.

This paper is a part of the project Spaces for multilingualism (Swedish Research Council, 2021-04155). The aim of the project is to generate knowledge about the pedagogical potentials and limitations of multilingual practices in mathematics and science education. We specifically aim to explore and problematise how multilingual approaches and activities may promote mathematics and science teaching and learning in school years 4–9. The qualitative project is conducted by an interdisciplinary research team that integrates theories from educational research in didactics, sociology and linguistics, including translanguaging theories. The project’s four-year period comprises initial exploration of existing pedagogical practices, in four culturally and linguistically diverse schools. The explorative phase is followed by a two-year period of pedagogical interventions.The presentation will focus on the exploratory phase of the study and the preliminary findings from interviews with students and teachers, workshops where teachers and researchers worked together, and classroom observations, and focus on teachers’ and students’ use of meaning-making resources in science education, and how students’ prior experiences and communicative repertoires are acknowledged as resources in multilingual classroom activities.

Today many classrooms in Sweden are multilingual, characterized by a diversity of linguistic, cultural and epistemological resources available for teaching and learning. Handling this diversity puts certain demands on teachers in order to provide all students equal learning opportunities in a context where the language of instruction is Swedish. As a response to this, local school development projects based on multilingualism as a resource have been initiated. This study focuses on two such projects with the aim to deepen the knowledge about how translanguaging teaching practices can be developed. To make visible what characterizes as well as enable and constrain translanguaging teaching practices under development, the theory of practice architectures is used. Three different practices are identified The Multilingual, The Ambivalent multilingual and The Monolingual teaching practice. The practices are formed by differing cultural-discursive, material-economic and social-political arrangements. Above all, cultural-discursive arrangements such as norms and ideas affect the differences between the three practices. Existing norms and ideas affect how material and economic resources, mostly identic in all three practices, are used. Furthermore, monolinguistic norms seem to form hierarchical relations. Thus, we argue to develop translanguaging practices multilingual norms are important to develop.

In this paper we discuss how newly arrived students experience, and perform in, school mathematics. There is little research on immigrant students' initial time in Swedish school, and it is methodologically underdeveloped. Our own research will be revisited, and we give an account of the methodologies we have developed. We look for analytical tools using both qualitatively as well as quantitatively, to interpret classroom interaction, social practises, individual performance and achievement. Our attention to diversity and equity issues includes avoiding deficit discourses explaining both success and failure in school mathematics, in relation to backgrounds, language and culture.

As a response to recent laws on how to support newly-arrived students’ schooling, new policy texts have been released in Sweden. By analyzing policy texts we show how a particular kind of human, “the newly-arrived student as a mathematical learner” is fabricated through discursive processes. We show how the policy texts are framed within an including discourse that encourages multiculturalism, and views students’ mother tongue and backgrounds as resources. However, simultaneously the newly-arrived student is thought of, in a more excluding discourse, as being in need of rescue and as lacking the most valuable asset, the Swedish language.

The project Spaces for multilingualism is founded by the Swedish Research Council (2022-2026). The purpose of the interdisciplinary project is to generate knowledge about the pedagogical potentials and limitations of multilingual practices in mathematics and science education. We specifically aim to explore and problematise how multilingual approaches and activities may promote mathematics and science teaching and learning in school years 4–9. The qualitative project is conducted by an interdisciplinary research team that integrates theories from educational research in didactics, sociology and linguistics, including translanguaging theories. The project’s four-year period comprises initial exploration of existing pedagogical practices, mainly through workshops with teachers, classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers, in four culturally and linguistically diverse schools. This explorative phase is followed by a two-year period of pedagogical interventions, in which teachers and researchers together design, carry out and analyse classroom interventions. The interventions involve exploring the pedagogical potentials and limitations for promoting multilingual resources for teaching and learning. Further, students’ identities as engaged learners of mathematics and science are explored. Our ambition is for the project to contribute with new and multifaceted knowledge on the complexity of teaching and learning in multilingual mathematics and science classrooms in mainstream compulsory schools in which the students have a variety of language backgrounds. The presentation will focus on the explorative phase of the study and the preliminary results from interviews with students and teachers as well as workshops in which teachers and researchers collaborated. We will also present the ongoing preparations for the interventional phase of the study.

The overall aim of the chapter is to contribute to the discussion on how teachers’ facilitation of classroom interaction can be understood in view of mono- and bi-/multilingual norms, and more specifically how teachers relate to, make use of, and strengthen children’s epistemic authority through language competences in the multilingual classroom. The analysis is primarily based on two sets of data. First, teacher interviews which answer to what problems and solutions teachers experience concerning teaching and learning in the multilingual classroom, and how they view their role as facilitator of dialogue and a promoter of agency and hybrid integration in relation to this. Secondly, video-recordings of classroom interaction in selected European localities teachers’ facilitation of dialogue were explored with regard to considering monolingual and bi-/multilingual ideologies and the promotion of hybrid integration. The analysis shows how the monolingual ideology permeates the data material. Students’ multilingual resources are not recognised and valued; consequently, multilingual students’ agency and epistemic authority is hindered. However, there are glimpses of “cracks” where spaces for alternative practices can be developed, in which students can use their full linguistic repertoire, including varying named languages to express their views or ideas beyond the language of instruction, which create potentials for strengthening students’ participation in classroom interactions. The chapter argues that children’s language competences should be integral to understandings of their epistemic authority and calls for further research into how strategies that accomplish this can be developed and transferred across classrooms and localities, with the purpose of strengthening all children’s epistemic authority in education.

School mathematics is not universal. It produces and is produced by social norms. What is considered as normatively appropriate school mathematics may vary when immigrant students (re)produce school mathematics in transitions between school mathematical practices at home and at school. In this study, one group of primary school students and two groups of secondary school students were interviewed to investigate their experiences with school mathematics in transitions. In contrast to some previous studies, the present study reveals instances where students positioned their parents as mathematically knowledgeable. To some students, it was important to know mathematical concepts in the mother tongue to be positioned as knowledgeable in mathematical conversations at home. This suggests that pedagogical practices should not only facilitate the transition of students’ everyday experiences into mathematics classrooms but also explore how school mathematics can be transitioned out of school, particularly considering transnationalities where ways of knowing transcend national boundaries.

In a small on-going participatory research project, we collaborate with mathematics teachers. The project has reached a point where we, both the researchers and the teachers, have come to recognize the need to involve students in the design of their mathematics learning spaces because their knowledges and experiences may provide a crucial contribution. Therefore, we investigate in what way the students, teachers and researchers may collaborate to design mathematics learning spaces to facilitate multilingual students’ mathematics learning. Involving the students in designing socially just mathematics learning spaces necessitates particular methodological decisions and identifies challenges in need of careful attention.

We interviewed groups of students in a language diverse school, where the prevailing language norm was Swedish only, to answer the question; What do students say about relocating school academic mathematics in transitions between home and school? The students mentioned relocating school academic mathematical concepts, problem solving and arithmetical methods from home to school and vice versa. The relocating work provided resources for mathematics learning and feelings of being smart and mathematically knowledgeable and the opposite. We conclude that pedagogical designs that enhance students' first languages and home cultures as resources may benefit from considering students' work with relocating school academic mathematics to enhance opportunities for mathematics learning.

In this, paper we attend to epistemological potentials of multilingual language use and mathematics in connection to the ‘language-as-resource’ idea and how the idea is actualised in Swedish mathematics education contexts. In this paper we develop and propose a framework for considering different epistemological potentials for multilingual mathematics activities that are embedded in the ‘language-as-resource’ idea.

In the context of humanistic Bildung-centred Didaktik, the educational potential of different school subjects is emphasized. But how can different school subjects collectively contribute to the ‘cultivation-of-human-powers’ and Bildung with a focus on sustainability? In this article, seven different school subjects are compared. Eleven teacher educators from Malmö University, Sweden, have written scholarly about the roles of their respective school subjects for Bildung and sustainability. Drawing from the texts related to the seven school subjects – geography, mathematics, physical education and health, religious education, science for citizenship, Swedish as a second language, and visual arts – a comparative analysis was conducted. The primary focus was to understand the unique characteristics of each school subject, explore their epistemic differences, and discern their potential roles in fostering cross-curricular didactics for Bildung and sustainability. It is shown that the different school subjects collectively provide complementary contributions to contemporary Bildung and climate change literacy.

This paper explores the relation between discourses and identity formations as mathematical learners in the context of transition.The data consists of an interview with two 16 years old immigrant girls who were re-allocated when their school in a multicultural and socio-economically disadvantaged area in Sweden was closed. The girls showed dynamic and unstable identities by drawing on different discourses. Social realtional discourses more than mathematical pedagogical discorses, governed their actions as learners of mathematics. Enabling identities as noisy un-engaged but able students in the old school, and as engaged and accepted, but also as strangers, in the new school.

This thesis explores immigrant students’ opportunities to learn mathematics. The research is concerned with issues of social justice and adopts a socio-political approach. Immigrant students are often described as students who do poorly in school because they lack “Swedishness” and have insufficient Swedish language skills. This deficit discourse is used when explaining immigrant students’ failure in mathematics, which this thesis aims to critique. Also, by adopting two theoretical frameworks, one that draws on the work of Skovsmose (1994, 2014) and one on the work of Foucault (2000, 2002), it aims at exploring possible understandings of immigrant students’ opportunities to learn mathematics.

The research questions are addressed in a preamble and four articles. They address immigrant students’ perceptions of their opportunities to learn mathematics and how these perceptions come into existence, and the different contributions of using the theoretical frameworks.

Data emanates from interviews, with immigrant students aged 15 to 16 years old and policy texts regarding schooling for newly arrived. Skovsmose’s notion of foreground is used when analysing immigrant students’ perceptions of their opportunities to learn mathematics. A Foucauldian perspective is used for exploring immigrant students’ identity formations as mathematical learners in a context of a forced school transition. The notions of fabrication and abjection (Popkewitz, 2012, 2013) are used as analytical tools when exploring how the newly arrived student as a mathematical learner is fabricated in policy texts.

The findings show how conditions concerning future plans, otherness, Swedishness, perceiving their parents as deficit in relation to Swedish parents, segregation, feelings of exclusion and rowdy mathematics classrooms constitute their foregrounds, and affect their perceptions of their opportunities to learn mathematics. It was also shown how students’ identity formations as learners of mathematics are dynamic and enabled by discourse. For example, discourses operating in two different school contexts enabled the transitioning students to form identities as un-engaged and respectively engaged mathematics students. It was shown how students’ perceptions were influenced by public discourses, and thus how categorisations of them as immigrant students with deficiencies had looped into their lives. By exploring fabrication of the newly arrived student as a mathematical learner and the process of abjection information on how students may be ordered in relation to what degree they have come to master for example the Swedish language were provided. This may generate feelings of in(ex)clusion, which refers to the inseparability of inclusion and exclusion: any move to include brings with it potential exclusions.

A conclusion is that to be able to understand immigrant students’ opportunities to learn mathematics and explain achievement in mathematics, deficiency explanations are not sufficient. Instead, it is of importance to try to understand the students’ perspectives and explore the role of discourse and power since it allows for explanations that ground students’ opportunities to learn mathematics in the socio-political conditions in which they emerge. This enables for learning more about what constitutes immigrant students’ perceptions and how they come into existence and thus allows for addressing processes of in(ex)clusion and critique deficiency explanations.

To escape imposed deficit discourses around immigrant students when discussing their achievement in mathematics; this study examines immigrant students’ own perspectives on their opportunities to learn mathematics. This was done by interviewing immigrant students from a multicultural and socially deprived area in Sweden, in two focus groups. In the interviews rowdy mathematics classrooms, the multicultural school and segregation emerged as hindrances that limit their opportunities to learn mathematics, creating a feeling of despair. However, the students demonstrated hope when talking about the future, which indicates a need for students towalk a balance between these two opposites when interpreting their opportunities to learn mathematics.

This paper sets out to describe a research project and to present and discuss some of its pre- liminary findings from an initial explorative phase. The project is conducted in collaboration with mathematics and science teachers in four mainstream compulsory schools with strong linguistic diver- sity within a geographic frame of a predominantly urban region in Sweden. The overall aim of the study is to generate knowledge about pedagogical potentials and limitations of multilingual practices in mathematics and science education. In this paper we draw on interviews with teachers, as well as workshops in which teachers and researchers collaborated, to explore the various meaning-making re- sources teachers express they draw on for teaching mathematics in multilingual settings, and their per- ceptions and experiences of teaching mathematics in multilingual settings. The preliminary findings indicate that the teachers draw on different meaning-making resources, with emphasis on resources that can be related to language responsive teaching. It seems easier for the teachers to reason about language responsive mathematics teaching than multilingual mathematics teaching. The teachers rea- son more about the value of a multilingual approach and less of concrete multilingual methods and strategies for teaching mathematics to multilingual students. They express positive views about multi- lingualism as a resource for learning mathematics at the same time as they show a hesitancy towards it, demonstrating an ambivalence.

This paper sets out to describe a research project and to present and discuss some of its preliminary findings from an initial explorative phase. The project is conducted in collaboration with mathematics and science teachers in four mainstream compulsory schools with strong linguistic diversity within a geographic frame of a predominantly urban region in Sweden. The overall aim of the study is to generate knowledge about pedagogical potentials and limitations of multilingual practices in mathematics and science education. In this paper we draw on interviews with teachers, as well as workshops in which teachers and researchers collaborated, to explore the various meaning-making resources teachers express they draw on for teaching mathematics in multilingual settings, and their perceptions and experiences of teaching mathematics in multilingual settings. The preliminary findings indicate that the teachers draw on different meaning-making resources, with an emphasize on resources that can be related to language responsive teaching. It seems easier for the teachers to reason about language responsive mathematics teaching than multilingual mathematics teaching. The teachers reason about the value of a multilingual approach and more less of concrete multilingual methods and strategies for teaching mathematics to multilingual students. They express positive views about multilingualism as a resource for learning mathematics at the same time as they show a hesitancy towards it, demonstrating an ambivalence towards it.

Språk, kultur och matematik är ett nationellt lärar- och forskarnätverk som bildades 2021. Här beskrivs villkoren för dagens matematikundervisning och det arbete som görs av forskare och lärare för att bättre förstå och utveckla matematikundervisningen i mångkulturella, flerspråkiga matematikklassrum. Avslutningsvis bjuds intresserade in att delta i nätverket.

This systematic literature review explores meaning(s) of a student perspective in mathematics education research by investigating the intentionalities of research texts that use a student perspective. The study views research texts as being produced in and infuenced by the context and the discourses in which they are submerged. In exploring the meaning(s) of a student perspective in mathematics education research, we draw on Skovsmose’s intentionality interpretation of meaning. A total of 98 unique research texts were explored, resulting in three meanings of student perspectives in mathematics education research: ‘feelings, experiences, and views’, ‘evaluating interventions’ and ‘validating efects’. The results show that student perspectives in mathematics education research predominantly consisted of studies with the intentionalities of evaluation and validation having a “regular” student in mind. Perspectives from students with certain characteristics, like underserved students and students in diferent performance levels, are scarce. While the fndings might not be surprising, this literature review nonetheless calls for rethinking student perspectives in mathematics education research to include research with students that recognize students’ diverse backgrounds. We end the article by suggesting a desire-based research approach to seriously address students’ hopes, wishes, aspirations, and desires in mathematics education research. 

Matematisk litteracitet kan definieras på många olika sätt. Varje definition försöker fånga vad det innebär att kunna ta sig fram i världen med matematik. Genom att definiera matematiskt litteracitet på ett visst sätt främjas, implicit eller explicit, ett visst slags matematiskt kunnande och därmed vissa slags sociala praktiker medan andra tonas ned eller rent av exkluderas. Det väcker frågor om hur elever inkluderas och exkluderas i relation till matematisk litteracitet i skolan. Utifrån ett kritiskt perspektiv belyser vi tre olika fall som relaterar till matematik, kroppen och tingen, matematik och flerspråkighet, samt matematik och social klass, för att visa hur vissa sociala praktiker och därmed vissa elever begränsas eller rent av exkluderas när uppmaningen ”Förklara hur du tänkte” genomsyrar matematikundervisning. Genom att anlägga ett kritiskt perspektiv vill vi uppmärksamma frågor om social rättvisa och bidra till att utmana och vidga synen på matematisk litteracitet.

The text discusses the gatekeeping role of mathematics education for youth in Malmö (and elsewhere) with immigrant backgrounds. The text argues that mathematics education may play a significant role as a gatekeeper for immigrant students’ advancements in the educational system as well as in the society at large.

In this paper we unpack epistemological aspects of language and mathematicspotentials embedded in the ”language as resource” discourse. We use researchliterature, policy, and interviews with a mathematics teacher and a multilingualstudent to illustrate the potentials and how they are realised in the material. Weidentified a ”lever potential” and ”one new whole” potential. To consider thepotentials in a nuanced way, we propose an analytical model which contributeswith theoretical conceptualizations that allows for grasping a relation betweenepistemologies of language and mathematics from the perspective of thelanguage as resource discourse

The aim of this workshop is to explore how collages could function as a research methodology that takes seriously power issues connected to hierarchies, by increasing multivocality and pluralism, in order to facilitate dialogue. In small groups, the participants will explore and respond to some collages that teacher educators have created about their desires for mathematics education in migration contexts. The workshop will focus on the following questions, a) how and what desires can be interpreted in the collages? and b) therefore are collages an ethical research method for co-constructing dialogues? 

The purpose of the study is to examine how immigrant students, who live and attend school in multicultural and socially deprived areas, are experiencing their possibilities to learn mathematics. The thesis discusses how public discourses affect students’ foregrounds and rationales for learning in different ways, contributing to how the students perceive their possibilities to learn mathematics. The empirical material consists of focus group interviews with students in grade 9. The results show that immigrant students’ shortcomings in mathematics are affected by wide variety of influences, most of which are out of their control to change. The study suggests that it is of importance to consider the influence of public discourse on students’ possibilities to learn mathematics. Students live within these discourses and have accepted them as "the truth about the world". One implication from the findings is that access to an equivalent mathematics education for students in Swedish Compulsory School needs to be problematized and include factors outside of the classroom situation itself.

In Sweden often immigrant students’ failure in mathematics is explained by referring to deficit discourses. To critique that our aim have been to highlight the complexity of the situation in which immigrant students are positioned, by interrogating their perspectives on mathematics homework and the importance of parental support, as well as how their views seemed to have been shaped by wider Discourses. The students describe their parents’ background and education as inadequate, while “Swedish” parents’ backgrounds were considered desirable. With no hope of changing their parents, they seemed to have accepted that they have limited possibilities for achieving in mathematics.