Foregrounding social justice in mathematics teacher education
Peter Gates2009, Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education
This is quite surprising-but we are not criticising the Journal or its editors for ignoring social justice issues, nor for reluctance to publish articles in that field. Rather we suspect that this reflects the fact that few articles have been submitted which might raise some questions about the place of social justice within mathematics teacher education. However, the invitation to us to produce a special issue is a clear attempt to put that right and we congratulate JMTE for recognising the important contribution that understanding the relationship between social justice and mathematics teacher education can make to the literature-and we thank the editor for the opportunity. These two Special Issues are quite timely. Mathematics and social justice has been the focus of much research-however, this has largely focussed on such issues as the process of learning, the content of the curriculum and its assessment. Possibly rather less has focussed on issues for teacher educators. The challenge for us in putting together this Special Issue was to relate two key themes-on the one hand a social justice perspective and on the other, the professional development of mathematics teachers. This has not been easy and there were a number of proposals which we had to reject because they did not position themselves in that nexus. For example, we did not accept articles that claimed to offer a socially just curriculum in a teacher education programme that purported to make an improvement for all learners. So we needed evidence that the focus in articles was in some way aimed at alleviating the position of the most disadvantaged groups-and to take that to its logical conclusion this really has to be at the expense of the already advantaged; we cannot reduce social injustice by merely giving everyone a chair to stand on. Already there is some suggestion that many current attempts at reducing social exclusion, do improve the situation for the most marginalised, yet at the same time do an even better job for the most affluent leaving the gap even wider. We sought articles that reduced this gap. However, even that stance presented us with very diverse perspectives across the articles in these two Special Issues. Some articles focus on teacher development for social justice looking at pupils as excluded in the classroom, whereas others look at teacher education for social justice by looking at groups of teachers who are themselves seen as excluded groups. However, the eight articles cover a broad range of perspectives which we hope will mark out some of the territory for years to come. We start by saying something about the creation of the Special Issues on social justicewhich we were invited to consider in mid-2007. There were several key principles. First the articles needed to cover both the field of mathematics teacher education and have a social justice perspective. This was not always easy because there were sometimes quite different expectations of what ''social'' meant as well as what ''justice'' implied and we had several discussions with some authors on both those points. Secondly, we wanted both an international editorial team (Gates-UK, Jorgensen-Australia, Civil-USA and Matos-Portugal) as well as an international group of authors and reviewers (
