Public media both refects and shapes societal perceptions and attitudes. Teachers and others around students in mathematics classrooms have expectations for the students, projected with what appears in these media. We are most concerned about the expectationsplaced on students who are identifed with minoritized groups—particularly students whoare Indigenous or migrated to Norway. We investigate how minoritized group contexts andmathematics education appear together in Norwegian news media texts. Our analysis usesthe notion of storylines to describe the expectations about minoritized groups that newsmedia project. We found seven entangled storylines: “the majority language and cultureare keys to learning and knowing mathematics,” “mathematics is language- and cultureneutral,” “minoritized groups’ mathematics achievements are linked to culture and gender,”“extraordinary measures are needed to teach students from minoritized groups mathematics,” “students from minoritized groups underachieve,” “students from minoritized groupsput in extraordinary efort and time to learn mathematics,” and “minoritized mathematicsstudents are motivated by gratitude.”

In this chapter, we report on a small-scale critical mathematics education project in a Swedish classroom with students of varied language backgrounds. The project departed from the student Arvid’s statement “Mathematics is bad for society.” Our research interest was twofold. On the one hand, we wanted to explore what knowledge is being (re)produced by students as they try to connect and reason with a statement like “Mathematics is bad for society.” And on the other hand, we were also interested in how the students in this classroom, in which they do not have shared mother tongues, can express and (dis)acknowledge knowledge when reasoning about mathematics in society. We found that when the students (and their teacher) grappled with unpacking critical aspects such as “mathematics in society,” their reciprocal assessment of claims was based on their individual ways of knowing and talking, and tended to shape both their actions and the outcome of their efforts. We show that the discussion around critical aspects of mathematics in society that came to the fore was intertwined with both students’ and the teacher’s (lack of) meta-understanding of language diversity.

In this chapter, we consider an interaction among a researcher and four 4-year-old boys who were asked to count beans. By recognizing multiple discourses at play, we problematize the identification of this (and other) interaction as a mathematical (or counting) situation. We identify aspects of the children’s language repertoires and consider how they index various discourses and authority structures. We ask how these discourses intersect in the interaction, and then identify potential implications for education practice and research.

Mathematics is full of mystery. We illuminate the myth to expose two conflicting senses of mystery at work in mathematics and its education practices. There is a sense of boundlessness with mathematics-the idea that we never fully know. There is also a practice of concealment, in which an answer or solution is known by special people who may support or provide a scaffold for students' navigation to the "special" knowledge, but may also challenge their access to it by erecting barriers and boundaries. In remythologizing mystery, we identify that the valorization of mystery in mathematics is rooted in the wonder of exploring boundless landscapes and is used misleadingly to justify school mathematics with the other sense of mystery-uncovering the concealed.

When we count, we have to decide what counts and what does not count. Thus, counting is a political act. Certain language repertoires are necessary to convey the ideas and perhaps even to perform counting actions. At the same time, the language used to describe these ideas and enact the processes shapes the way we conceptualize them. Our interest in the experience of counting includes the way counting and its communication position people. In this chapter we identify how micro-political moves are manifested in language and counting situations, including reciting numbers, counting things present and not, and subordinating counting to another goal. In our analysis, we look for language strategies that enable the process of deciding what to (not) count as the process of establishing boundaries or categories, and we consider how these processes work as political acts.

Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in residential schools since the 1870s and until 1996 in Canada with the aim to “kill the Indian in the child.” A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was formed in 2008 to provide victims of these schools the opportunity to recount their experiences in a safe and culturally appropriate manner. After five years of gathering these experiences, the TRC report summarizes what was heard, and identifies 94 calls to action. We will show how numbers are used and not used in two TRC documents. We identify the value of such analysis for school and university mathematics teachers as an example of a culturally situated use of number for rhetorical purposes, which relates to the ideas of culturally responsive teaching and critical mathematics education. Not only does this kind of learning address calls for democratic and critical citizenship, it belongs in Canada’s new age of responsiveness to Indigenous experiences of colonialism.

In this paper we show the ways love and bullying appear in mathematical communications. We developed an analytic frame that distinguished between responsiveness and dismissiveness, and that identified whether communication acts opened dialogue or closed off the voices of others. The frame helped us identify what authority was used to close dialogue, and how dialogue was opened up as well. The findings allowed us to illustrate how responsiveness and opening up dialogue are central to love and mathematically productive, but also to problematize this argument.

Indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in residential schools since the 1870s and until 1996 in Canada with the aim to “kill the Indian in the child.” A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was formed in 2008 to provide victims of these schools the opportunity to recount their experiences in a safe and culturally appropriate manner. After five years of gathering these experiences, the TRC report summarizes what was heard, and identifies 94 calls to action. We will show how numbers are used and not used in two TRC documents. We identify the value of such analysis for school and university mathematics teachers as an example of a culturally situated use of number for rhetorical purposes, which relates to the ideas of culturally responsive teaching and critical mathematics education. Not only does this kind of learning address calls for democratic and critical citizenship, it belongs in Canada’s new age of responsiveness to Indigenous experiences of colonialism.

In this article, the authors propose a set of multi-level questions as a guide for de- veloping an ethical attitude in researcher–participant and researcher–researcher relations during the research writing process. Drawing on the sociopolitical turn in mathematics education, the authors view these relations in terms of power and po- sitionings, in the dialectic between the micro-level of research writing and the wid- er, macro-level context of mathematics education. The authors illustrate the use of the proposed questions through a back-and-forth dialogue. The dialogue draws on experiences from a writing collaboration in which the authors—“the research- ers”—wrote up for publication research conducted in their respective contexts of the Political North and Political South. Both research projects focused on how mathematics students—“the participants”—narrate and hence position themselves and are narrated and positioned by mathematics education and sociopolitical dis- courses in research publications.

We consider an interaction among one of us researchers and four 4-year-old boys who were asked to count beans. By recognizing multiple discourses at play, we problematize the identification of this interaction (and other interactions) as a mathematical (or counting) situation. We identify aspects of the children’s language repertoires and consider how they index various discourses and authority structures. We ask how these discourses intersect in the interaction.