We Must Cultivate Our Common Ground
The present volume addresses some valuable themes relevant to the scholarly contributions of Ted Eisenberg to the teaching, learning, and doing of mathematics. In this reflective postscript, I raise some issues associated with the identity of, and the ten
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We Must Cultivate Our Common Ground Jeremy Kilpatrick
Abstract The present volume addresses some valuable themes relevant to the scholarly contributions of Ted Eisenberg to the teaching, learning, and doing of mathematics. In this reflective postscript, I raise some issues associated with the identity of, and the tension between, the academic fields of mathematics and mathematics education. I argue that, far from having drifted apart, those fields continue to make productive contact with and complement one another. Their common preoccupation with mathematics as it is created through teaching keeps them together. The challenge to mathematicians and mathematics educators is to make fertile the common ground they share. Keywords Mathematics · Mathematics education · Academic fields · Community · Teaching · Ted Eisenberg
Communities of Mathematics and Mathematics Education To judge by the chapters in the present volume, the spring 2012 symposium honoring Ted Eisenberg must have been a fascinating, frustrating occasion: fascinating because of the wealth of challenging ideas put forward by these distinguished mathematicians and mathematics educators; frustrating because so many of the ideas were developed only sketchily and, despite the best efforts of the synthesizers for each panel, not always well integrated. The themes of the plenaries and panels— mutual expectations, history, problem solving, mathematical literacy, visualization, justification and proof, policy, and collaboration—appear to have been chosen not merely, as Michael Fried says in his introduction, because they reflect “commonality and difference joining and dividing the communities of mathematics and mathematics education” but also because they all touch on issues that Ted has addressed at one point or another throughout his long, productive career. An elaboration of any one of those themes and the issues it raises concerning the common ground between mathematics education and mathematics could easily have filled a book this J. Kilpatrick (B) University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA 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_19, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014
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size. With eight themes plus the “dialogue on the dialogue” regarding the identity of mathematics education as a field as it relates to mathematics as a field, the book cannot possibly do justice to the many points the authors raise. Nor can I in this reflection do anything like adequate justice to any of those points. Instead, I address questions of identity and challenge the contention, made in the introduction, that there is a “growing divide between the mathematics community and the mathematics education community.” I see those communities as closely intertwined as they have ever been—even though from some angles of vision they might appear to be moving apart. We have common ground whether we know it or not.
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