Mathematics and Mathematics Education: Beginning a Dialogue in an Atmosphere of Increasing Estrangement
In 2009, Norma Presmeg wrote a piece for a special issue of the ZDM on interdisciplinarity. Presmeg’s paper presented her view of the general spirit of and possibilities for mathematics education research. This prompted a dialogue on the state of mathemat
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Mathematics and Mathematics Education: Beginning a Dialogue in an Atmosphere of Increasing Estrangement Michael N. Fried
Abstract In 2009, Norma Presmeg wrote a piece for a special issue of the ZDM on interdisciplinarity. Presmeg’s paper presented her view of the general spirit of and possibilities for mathematics education research. This prompted a dialogue on the state of mathematics education by Ted Eisenberg and Michael Fried, published in the same issue of ZDM. This paper gives an account of that dialogue and the symposium in honor of Ted that arose out of it; in doing so, it also further elaborates on the themes that motivated this book. Keywords Human sciences vs exact sciences · Mathematical content · Mathematicians · Mathematics education researchers · Mathematics education · Values
My Dialogue with Ted When Dani Berend broached the idea of a conference in honor of Ted Eisenberg, it was immediately clear to me what the subject of the conference should be. It should concern the relationship between mathematics and mathematics education as disciplines. The thin mathematical backgrounds of many researchers in mathematics education, and worse, their apparent lack of interest in mathematics, had become one of Ted and my constant conversation topics. Ted often lamented to me how out of place he felt in a field more and more dominated by sociology, psychology, politics, anthropology, and philosophy, and less and less by mathematics. His feelings were understandable. For almost his entire academic career, Ted sat in a mathematics department, and, besides his own mathematics education research, he taught regular courses in the mathematics department, working hard to introduce students to calculus and linear algebra. Teaching mathematics, and, therefore, knowing mathematics, has always been for him at the center of mathematics education, and he has always maintained it should be. Not only is a mathematics department M.N. Fried (B) Science and Technology Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel e-mail: [email protected] M.N. Fried, T. Dreyfus (eds.), Mathematics & Mathematics Education: Searching for Common Ground, Advances in Mathematics Education, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-7473-5_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
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the right place for the study of mathematics education, in his view, but also a solid mathematics background was requisite for fruitful mathematics education research. For my part, when we spoke about these things, I often took the position of the devil’s advocate and defended the usefulness of non-mathematical mathematics education research. But I was not always consistent in that role, not wholly the devil’s advocate. On the one hand, I could not help often commiserating with Ted about the limited mathematical understanding of many researchers who consider mathematics their specialty and about research that tries to solve the problems of the world rather than those of mathematics teaching and learning. On the other hand, I could deny some gen
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