It is now one year into your term as Chair of BSRLM: Could you outline activities that you feel are important for the organisation during this time? What are you and the committee hoping to achieve in the next two years?
The year has certainly gone quickly! We have had 3 successful conferences in the last year (in Manchester, Bristol and online), and three fantastic issues of Research in Mathematics Education (RME) have been published. I am incredibly grateful to all the people whose work make these things happen (the BSRLM executive members, the local conference organisers, the RME editors, the editorial assistant and all the reviewers) as well as all the people who attend and present at the conferences and who submit their work to RME.
At my first Exec meeting we discussed what, collectively, we saw as our strategic mission and decided on five priorities; I hope in the next two years we might make progress on these. The first is increasing participation at BSRLM from across the four nations of the UK. We hope to have a conference in 2025 in Scotland, in progressing this priority. Inclusivity is at the heart of BSRLM and the unique atmosphere of support and challenge at conferences is the thing the exec agreed on unanimously as the most precious asset we want to preserve. The second aim was reaching out to other communities in mathematics education research – the exec are exploring if we might have another joint conference (as has happened three times in the past, with colleagues from Norway, France and Ireland). The third priority is contributing to national narratives about research in mathematics education and, in particular, trying to establish channels of communication with Ofsted. A positive move in this direction is that Steve Wren, from Ofsted, will be coming to the June BSRLM conference. This aim is not about BSRLM taking a stance on the content of research, but rather engaging in the process of how research is used in policy and promoting academic standards in reviews of research. Our fourth aim is stabilising finances and processes. Over the last year, with rising prices of putting on conferences, we were concerned that our finances were in danger of getting precarious. We were grateful to the AGM in supporting the difficult decision to raise the cost of attending a conference to £30 and charging £10 for the online conference. We feel this still represents good value and the change should stabilise our finances for the next two years. And, finally, we want to seek ways of further promoting the excellence of the our journal, RME.
The UK government is aiming to establish a National Academy for the Mathematical Sciences. In what ways do you anticipate this might influence mathematics education generally? In what ways do you envisage BSRLM can support and be supported by the National Academy?
It will be interesting to see how things work with the new Academy. There is already a “Joint Mathematical Council” (JMC) bringing together diverse societies relating to mathematics – which the chair of BSRLM is invited to attend – and I am as yet unclear how the Academy and JMC will relate to each other. I think several people felt that the draft aims of the Academy did not make enough mention of mathematics education and I know several BSRLM members added their voice to pointing this out – so I personally hope to see a greater prominence to education in the new aims. There is a lot of change in the mathematics education landscape afoot, not just with the Academy but also with the potential merger of professional associations. BSRLM sits rather apart from this churn. I believe we have a unique role in offering a space for researchers (in the broadest sense) to do what they do best – that is to present, discuss, critique and challenge each others’ work and thinking. I don’t believe it is BSRLM’s place to take political stances on issues – but to foster debate and promote good research practices. And so, I suspect that BSRLM will be largely unaffected by the new Academy and will continue with its core roles of providing high quality conferences at reasonable cost and supporting a journal that is now among the most respected in our field.
What changes would you like to see in mathematics education at the school level over the next 10 to 15 years? What might be the implications for mathematic education research if these changes occurred?
As I mentioned above, I don’t believe it is BSRLM’s role to aim to come to any kind of collective view on these kinds of questions. So, I will answer this personally, rather than in my role as Chair. I see part of my own research work as preparing for the “curriculum to come”. It seems clear to me that our current curriculum, particularly at secondary school, is not fit for purpose, if we dare to peer outside the classroom walls at what is going on in the world. There are issues and challenges, which I find it helpful to think of as “socio-ecological” ones, in other words, issues such as climate change, which combine radical changes to the earth’s life sustaining systems, along with radical changes in society and politics (e.g., due to migration, drought, floods, etc). I would like to see a curriculum in which socio-ecological issues were present in mathematics classrooms in meaningful ways. I do not think we know yet what are good ways to do this, in different contexts. And so there seems to me a really urgent research agenda to think about what global and local socio-ecological challenges mean for mathematics education, and what mathematics education might mean for socio-ecological challenges (i.e., are there meaningful contributions to be made in mathematics classrooms)? I feel privileged to be involved in an ICMI Study Conference, taking place in 2025, looking at just these questions (ICMI Study 27 on “Mathematics Education and the Socio-Ecological”) which I would encourage anyone interested to consider joining!