This presentation explores how disciplinary knowledge is produced and shaped through both curriculum policy initiatives at a national level and their translation in practice by teachers at school level. Whilst there are many analyses of effects on curriculum of policy changes at national level, and many studies of classroom practice, our focus is on exemplifying how these intertwine. More specifically, we show how, epistemologically, curriculum objects are constructed both ‘downwards’ in actual policy (Ball & Bowe, 1992) and ‘upwards’ as this state policy is translated in practice by teachers. In order to allow us to illustrate the effects on practice in detail, we focus on mathematics as the context for this study within the local jurisdiction of England, and in particular we concentrate on one central aspect of mathematics, reasoning. Reasoning, above all mathematical ideas, might naturally be considered an objective, politically and pedagogically neutral, and specifically mathematical process, but following Popkewitz’s argument that, “the choice of curriculum involves philosophical, political and ethical questions” (1987, p. 16), we take the stance that, on the contrary, mathematical reasoning is strongly shaped in the practices of teachers having to operate within a particular schooling context. Our interest is therefore not what a particular curriculum subject – mathematics, in this case – ‘is’ but what it ‘becomes’. Our research question asks, how is mathematical reasoning constructed as, and in, discourse and what role does this construction play for those involved?

Our study is situated within the backdrop of a major professional development initiative in English schools, Teaching for Mastery, a nation-wide, £73M government-funded programme, rolled out across England through the National Centre for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics (NCETM). This is aimed at promoting a particular form of mathematics pedagogy based on approaches from ‘high performing’ regions, particularly Shanghai and Singapore. However, the curriculum is made more complex by the diverse nature of provision in England, especially central government management through guidance that is technically non-statutory but policed by inspection, and the commercial market for schools of teaching materials and associated training.

Our analysis draws on Bernstein’s (e.g. 1990) ideas about recontextualization of disciplines in school curricula, the content of any curriculum being formed through the recontextualisation of practices which originate in fields and disciplines outside of schooling. In this sense mathematical reasoning, in pedagogical terms, is constructed as a discursive object in the context of the purpose of schooling as it is understood at any one time. For teachers, this purpose comes from their understanding of policy, which we see as a cycle of interpretation and translation in which those involved ‘do policy work’ (Ball et al., 2011) in relation to different socially and culturally constructed discourses (Maguire et al., 2015). Discourse is used in Foucault’s sense of “practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak” (Foucault, 1977, p. 79), thus forming what can and cannot be said; what is considered as true within the set of culturally and historically bounded circumstances of the time. Moreover, Ball and Bowe (1992) theorise policy taking place at three levels: in the intention and influence of those involved in creating the policy text; in the actual texts that are produced; and in the practice of translation by schools and teachers.

Using these ideas, our work explores how a curriculum subject is shaped by the implications of policy decisions at the level of written and taught curriculum. This is significant to a global audience because England shares both education-specific and wider socio-economic policy characteristics with other countries. However, England’s policy differences, particularly high-stakes accountability, also offer insights which other countries might learn from. 

Our methodology consisted of two approaches: documentary analysis of key policy texts to consider mathematical reasoning as it appears as actual policy; and interviews with specialist primary mathematics teachers to explore the translation of policy. We selected a number of texts for analysis: the current English National Curriculum for mathematics (Department for Education, 2013); the more recent Non-statutory Guidance for Mathematics (Department for Education, 2020) which, though non-statutory, was written by a group headed by the Director (Primary Mathematics) of the NCETM which oversees Teaching for Mastery; Ofsted’s ‘Research Review Series: mathematics’ (Office for Standards in Education, 2021); and an Evidence Review on ‘Improving Mathematics’ from the Education Endowment Foundation (Hodgen et al., 2018). We interviewed 13 teachers via Zoom who were ‘mastery specialists’, having attended the Department for Education funded, NCETM training programme, and recruited voluntarily. This meant that they were drawn non-purposively and came from different schools, teaching different ages of pupils from 6 – 11 years old. Teacher interviews and initial documentary analysis were not focused solely on reasoning but were aimed at understanding teachers’ discursive positions in relation to Teaching for Mastery more generally. The project was overseen ethically by our own institutions. Participants were assured of the right to remain anonymous and keep data confidential. We imported all the policy documents and interview transcripts into nVivo (version 14) and conducted a word search for the term ‘reason*’ (to catch reason, reasonable etc.). We also included synonyms and set the search context to ‘broad’ to capture surrounding context resulting in paragraph-sized blocks of text as our units of data. These were then filtered for examples where reason* was being used in non-mathematical contexts, for example in teachers’ taking about their own ‘reasons’ for decisions they had made, or simply as background text (something seemed ‘reasonable’, for example). The remaining data were then read by returning to the original document to capture the surrounding context, and interpreted using Foucauldian discourse analysis to find out “What characterizes the discursive worlds people inhabit and what their implications are for possible ways-of-being?” (Willig, 2008, p.127). In this short presentation we focus in particular on the Non-statutory Guidance for Mathematics which, as actual policy, appears to influence practice the most. From this, and the words of participants in our interviews, we have constructed our own analytical account of the actual, intended and translated policy, recognising that other interpretations are possible.

We show how policy decisions about curriculum affect not simply surface-level features of teaching but the epistemological shape of a subject itself, and how this also shapes the policy in practice of pedagogical action. What we see in our data are examples of reasoning being constructed very particularly in a manner that serves the purposes of teaching associated with high-stakes accountability, demanding control and a degree of responsibilisation (Pratt, 2018). We are thus able to illustrate how national level policy and classroom practice intertwine; how, in the translation between curriculum as text and as practice, reasoning becomes some-thing that inscribes ways of working on pupils which teachers consider reasonable; as the ‘right’ kind of behaviour to be deemed high attaining. This illustrates the philosophical, political and ethical issues of curriculum choices (Popkewitz, 1987). We show how this takes place through the construction of particular instructional and regulative discourses (Bernstein, 2003). The actual policy of documentation produces an instructional discourse in which reasoning is left poorly defined, affording space for it to be recontextualised in specific ways which act to manage the manner in which pupils are required to think; part of the regulative discourse within which teaching and learning take place. This regulative discourse is created and maintained through the construction of reasoning as strongly classified– focusing pupils on specific aspects of the mathematics curriculum in specific ways that relate to expectations of how pupils should learn it – and strongly framed – affording reasoning to be used as a means for teachers to manage and control pupils’ apparent mathematical development. We think our findings have profound implications for what children experience in classrooms, narrowing and normalising learning in ways which contradict the political rhetoric surrounding the purpose of school mathematics as a creative subject which will support future prosperity.

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