WORKING GROUP ON GENDER AND MATHEMATICS:Ê

EMERGENT THEMES

Diana Erchick The Ohio State University at Newark Erchick.1@osu.edu

Linda Condron The Ohio State University at Marion linda.condron@osu.edu

Peter Appelbaum William Patterson University AppelbaumP@ wpunj.edu

This work started at PME XX In 1998, with sessions centered around "Gender and Mathematics: Integrating Research Strands," We explored why we do the work we do and what we know from this work; what the compelling topics are for future study; and how we might further this work.Ê The participants presented short papers and discussed issues introduced through our work.Ê The organizers conducted analyses of discussions and created a preliminary model to relate each of the discussion strands to each other.Ê Two main strands emerged: the "sex-gender system" and the "doing of mathematics."Ê The organizers saw that, in the discussions within the working group, the two strands did not overlap.Ê Thus, the organizers identified the lack of intersection as an absence and an indication of a direction for future study.

Initially, we saw gender and mathematics as two different axes of a matrix, and began placing research topics in the various cells of the matrix.Ê However, our work and our discussions led us to recognize that we needed more dimensions than could be represented with our simple matrix, because the work of feminists, woman mathematicians, and educators regarding issues of gender and mathematics were far more varied and complex to be neatly mapped onto a 2-dimensional grid.Ê We turned to webbing as a technique for visualizing the connections among the topics before us.Ê We identified clusters and themes, as well as many linkages between and among the clusters.Ê This illuminated for us the multidimensionalities of our inquiry efforts.Ê We concluded that not only did the web represent research strands in gender and mathematics, but it also represented the new ways in which the group was thinking about the research strands.Ê Figure 1 (courtesy of S.K. Damarin) is a computer rendition of what we produced that year.

Between the 1998 and 1999 sessions, we maintained electronic contact with members and worked to create a website for the Gender and Mathematics Working Group.Ê On-line, we initiated discussion of topics relevant to our work, such as the equity component of the NCTM 2000 Standards, and collaborated on the proposal and paper presentations for the 1999 working group.Ê

In 1999, we returned to PME XXI following the same general guidelines as in 1998.Ê Sessions were devoted to discussion, with the organizers responsible for synthesizing and analyzing each day's work and, based on this between-session work, determining the starting point and framework for the next session.Ê The first session was framed by the summary of work at and since PME XX and by the work contributed by Dawn Leigh Anderson, Peter Appelbaum, Susanne K. Damarin, and Diana B. Erchick.Ê In the second session, where goals were set by the group, the group made two main decisions: keep our work visible in the mathematics education community and work toward supporting ways to integrate our research findings into the mathematics education and mathematics teacher education.Ê Toward that end, we generated suggestions for how we might accomplish our goals.

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Figure 1

Toward the goal of maintaining a visible presence in the mathematics education community we intend to pursue and create outlets for our work. This intention will be realized partially through our original and continuing working group goal of producing a monograph on Gender and Mathematics for the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education.Ê Another suggestion was to maintain a strong voice in the formation and development of PME programming.

Toward the goal of finding ways to integrate our research into mathematics education we developed options as viable directions for our inquiry.Ê We hope to support the development of research to help understand the ways in which mathematics educators and mathematics teacher educators can integrate gender research findings into the mathematics classroom ö into the teaching, the learning and the representations of the content. We need to conduct and supervise research exploring the teaching practice in our own mathematics and mathematics education classrooms, as well as in the classrooms of other teacher or mathematics educators.Ê As already recommended by Fennema and Hart (1994) in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, mathematics education needs more research conducted from a qualitative and feminist perspective.Ê We believe that agenda will serve us well, not only in the effort to find ways in which we can and do integrate our research agendas into our teaching, but also in meeting the working group's goals of finding and addressing absences in the research around gender and mathematics.

In the third 1999 session we then took our agenda into the planning stages.Ê The organizers synthesized discussions from the previous 2 sessions, identifying emergent themes.Ê We identified those themes as possible topics to present to the group at large (i.e. those who were a part of the group the previous year but who were not able to be in attendance at the 1999 session).Ê Those themes we expect will become categories for the call for papers for the proposed monograph for JRME.Ê Those topics include but are not limited to the following: a) The development of epistemological voice; b) The integration of gender research into the mathematics classroom, K-16; c) The integration of gender research into the mathematics education classroom; d) The role of the content in addressing gender issues in mathematics education research; e) Mathematical success in fast-track and other programs for girls in mathematics; and f) Mathematical success for women in mathematics and math-using fields.

Since the 1999 working group sessions we have continued our work by a) working onöline to revise and complete the statements we drafted in Mexico; b) continuing development of the website (we intend to have all papers from the 1998 and 1999 Gender Working Group available on the site this winter); c) generating more topics for themes within the JRME monograph proposal; d) beginning to draft a call for papers to solicit participation from the Gender Working Group members for the proposed monograph.

Our work in the Gender Working Group has been successful in several regards.Ê Most importantly, the group has "broken new ground" in the study of gender and mathematics in that we have developed constellations of issues and questions grounded in mathematics that are pertinent to the problems under investigation.Ê Over the past decade, gender researchers in mathematics education have expressed the need to stop focusing strictly on girls and women and their attributes and failings.Ê Work towards a new focus will be represented in our development and organization of a gender and mathematics monograph.

In that psychology is one of the major areas of research on gender and mathematics, the projects of this group repeatedly intersect it.Ê The research presented through our working group, and ultimately the monograph, is interdisciplinary.Ê It reflects ideas, considerations, and is advanced not only from psychology and mathematics education, but also from sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history of mathematics, feminist theory, and other fields.Ê The study of gender and mathematics is of international interest and our work reflects influences from outside the US.Ê To be continued at PME 2000, the synthesis of our research, however, is based on work done in the United States.Ê This work parallels synthetic work done in Europe a few years ago.

The three Gender Working Group sessions for PME 2000 are organized as follows:

Session 1: Progress and starting points.Ê Assure all participants are current on the previous work, especially those new to the group or not in attendance at either of the previous years.

á Review the progress made in PME99Ê and PME98, review the papers on the website.

á Discuss website contents and its potential use, especially toward monograph goal.

á Set working goals for the three days of the conference.

Session 2: Organization of the monograph.Ê The second session will be devoted to the development of an organization for the monograph based on the papers we have, the themes that have already emerged, absences identified over the previous two years of our working group, and the suggestions of researchers outside our group.

Session 3: Identifying a working plan.Ê Our third working group session will require the group to develop a call for papers for the monograph.Ê This will necessitate agreement on the selection of topics and themes from session two.Ê We will develop a working plan for producing the monograph.Ê We will identify tasks, timelines, and participation in writing and administration for creation of the monograph proposal and the subsequent monograph itself.

We have identified absences in the research and compared that to the research agendas of the participants of the Gender Working Group.Ê Currently and beyond PME 2000, we use that alignment to identify accomplishments, needs and goals toward developing Gender and Mathematics as a more comprehensive field of study than we find it to be now.Ê Making the research on gender and mathematics a more integrated component of mathematics education, drawing together our work into a monograph on Gender and Mathematics, and continuing to develop research agendas to seek answers to as yet unanswered questions about gender and mathematics continue to be a part of our agenda.

References

Fennema, Elizabeth & Hart, Laurie E. (1994).Ê Gender and the JRME.Ê Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 25(6), 648-659.