Customer Reviews

Popular Culture, Educational Discourse, and Mathematics (Suny Series, Education and Culture : Critical Factors in the Formation of Character and Com)

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This ground-breaking book analyzes contemporary education discourse in the light of curriculum politics and popular culture, using sources ranging from academic scholarship to popular magazines, music video, film and television game shows. Mathematics is used as an "extreme case," since it is a discipline so easily accepted as separable from politics, ethics or the social construction of knowledge. Appelbaum's juxtaposition of popular culture, public debate and professional practice enables an examination of the production and mediation of "common sense" distinctions between school mathematics and the world outside of schools. Terrain ordinarily displaced or excluded by traditional education literature becomes the pendulum for a new conversation which merges research and practice while discarding pre-conceived categories of understanding. The book also serves as an entertaining introduction to emerging theories in cultural studies, progressively illustrating the uses of discourse analysis for comprehending ideology, the implications of power/knowledge links,professional practice as a technology of power, and curriculum as at once commodities and cultural resources. In this way, Appelbaum effectively reveals a direction for teachers, students and researchers to cooperatively form a community attentive to the politics of curriculum and popular culture.

This book changed my life. Everything about my teaching is different because of the ideas that are now in my mind when I go into the classroom. Math is all around us, but we need to look to see it. Culture and power are what math teaching is all about. Read and learn. I had to read this for a course I was taking, and I'm really glad I did. You can read it for just the cost of the book. It's worth it.

This study, which compares discussion of math education in professional protocols and popular cultural representations and uses of math is, first of all, a lot of fun to read: I have never before seen Wheel of Fortune related to mathematics and math education! Secondly, I feel like I really had my eyes opened, for example to the ways in which concerns about educating girls as well as boys in mathematics (legimitate concerns, to be sure)have often been manifested in professional discourses that exacerbate or even help create the problem. Parents, teachers, administrators, those interested in popular culture, and those interested in an important commentary on education in our society should definitely read this book.