In this chapter, I will discuss the implications for mathematics teaching and learning of views of mathematics as a social construction or as the timeless description of reality. I will suggest that most mathematicians appear to adopt the latter view, but that in rhetoric at least, mathematics educators and teachers seem to argue the former. I will address the important question of how interests are served by preferred perspectives. I will then suggest that mathematics educators have not yet taken on board the potential of a view of mathematics as a social construction largely because, in the dominant neo-Piagetian tradition, a mechanism for the connection between history-and-culture and learning cannot be articulated. I will argue that discursive, or cultural, psychology offers a language for such connections and will sketch some of the shifts in perspective that are offered for the mathematics classroom and for research in mathematics education. A recurring theme will be the resources that theoretical discourses offer for analyses of knowledge as power.

Mathematics as a social construction

Western rationality is predicated upon the assumption that the nature of the universe and all its elements is determinable by scientific study and predictable using mathematical laws. Perhaps by reason of Western hegemony that image is predominant around the world, although certainly not universal. Against that background, weak sociologies of mathematics are just about acceptable and strong ones appear as radical alternatives (Bloor 1976).