Report from the Critical Mathematics Education Working Group meeting: What are the implications of Bourdieu’s ideas for the mathematics classroom?

BSRLM’s CME Working Group met for the fifth time for a discussion prompted by the question: ‘What are the implications of Bourdieu’s ideas for the mathematics classroom?’ The meeting provided an opportunity for the 18 delegates attending to discuss how researchers, educators and teachers might draw on Bourdieu’s ideas, including ‘cultural capital’, ‘symbolic violence’ and ‘reflexive sociology’, to inform their practice. A series of prompts was used to facilitate discussion and six themes emerged from the responses: the contested nature of the term ‘cultural capital’; the relevance of Bourdieu’s theories to mathematics teaching; the extent to which the reproductive function of school mathematics is intentional; the relevance of Bourdieu’s ideas to an analysis of global inequalities; making sense of the self-perpetuation of conventional approaches to teaching mathematics; and possibilities offered by Bourdieu’s analysis for challenging the exploitative nature of school mathematics.