All hail the Reference King! | Pedagogical Skepticism

Allow me to say initially that I love the references on this paper- really just reading the references made me excited to read the paper. However there are 10 pages of references for an 8 page paper- is this appropriate?? This paper has an interesting premise- that the concept of culture, indicted as an obstacle to adoption of pedagogical and curricular reform, is underdeveloped theoretically. The discussion of three perspectives, individual, interactional, and social was very interesting.? Durkheim and Latour seem to make strange bed-fellows, and one is prompted to wonder whether the authors will articulate the ways in which these authors relate to one another (where are they complementary and where do they depart from one another?). While this paper may not be the place for that kind of theoretical work, it does pertain to the assertion made by the authors that they seek to employ a ?well articulated plurality? of ideas. I love the idea of using Latour for this kind of analysis in mathematics education and think that it will really work within the framework of the separate ethnographic case study (which the authors reference as in press), given Latour?s use of similar approaches in his seminal work, ?Laboratory Life?. The illustrative case study presented in this paper focuses on analysing the practice of one teacher from the three perspectives of culture. The assertion that the collective (or social?) perspective of culture is focused on understanding the describing and explaining the persistent features of a culture seems limited, and might be served by reference to more critical socio-cultural theoretical perspectives on culture or perhaps even some ideas from Critical Mathematics Education ala Skovsmose (and why not as the authors have already indicated their willingness to use a plurality of ideas?). It is interesting though that even as the authors claim that the perspective aims primarily to understand and describe, this framed as being so that ?we? can help educators change their practices to be more effective. The conclusion seems sound, and reminds me of a talk given by Paul Cobb at IOE a few years back about a large multi-level project that looked at instructional change at the level of the district, the school and the classroom- this research may be served by, or contribute to, interaction with the researchers engaged in that work.

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Source: http://socraticskeptic.wordpress.com/2013/07/01/all-hail-the-reference-king/

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