Year: 2022
Type: editorial
Abstract: The journal issue you are holding in your hands (figuratively speaking) looks a bit different than our usual ones.Like the March 2022 issue, all its articles center equity-focused research in mathematics education.Yet unlike the March issue, the current issue features only one Research Report, a piece of historical research by Sian Zelbo, documenting the life and work of E. J. Edmunds, an Afro-Creole mathematician and educator active in Louisiana during the tumultuous period after the American Civil War.The other pieces are three Research Commentaries by Rochelle Gutiérrez (2022), Nicole Louie and Wan-Yue Zhan (2022), and Luz Valoyes-Chávez and Lisa Darragh (2022).All three Commentaries take as their starting point the articles included in the March 2022 issue of JRME and their engagement with the topic of equity in mathematics education.The purpose of this editorial is to synthesize the arguments made in the three Commentaries and to explore how the conversation about equity in mathematics education could continue beyond them.Despite its content's shared focus on equity, the March 2022 issue of JRME was not a special issue in the traditional interpretation of that term.That is, we did not invite submission of articles on equity-focused research, and no special review process was applied to those pieces.1 Instead, as our editorial team went about the business of receiving reviews, producing decision letters, and working with authors to finish their manuscripts, we realized that we happened to accept four independently submitted articles around the same time that each had interesting things to say about equity.Noting the coincidence and the importance of the topic, we chose to configure the March issue so that the four articles we put together could illustrate some of the various ways in which our research community has taken up equity-focused research in mathematics education.As we wrote in our editorial for the March issue (Crespo et al., 2022), we felt that the diverse ways in which mathematics education research (both in that issue and more broadly) has focused on equity attested to the growth in volume and increasing centrality of this area of research.Moreover, we suggested that such diversity of approaches underscored (a) the need to conceptualize what equity means as an object of study and (b) the need for our field to address some tensions that emerge as our collective investment in the topic grows.We hoped that by publishing the articles together, JRME could contribute to a reflective conversation about the state of equity-focused research in our field.To further that conversation, we requested the Editorial Panel's sanction to invite Research Commentaries about the articles in the March 2022 issueand the broader themes involved-for potential publication in a later issue.Our motives for doing so were twofold: First, we sought to foster reflection and dialogue on these important issues in line with one goal of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (2017): advancing "access, equity, and empowerment" (para.5).Second, we wanted to make room for this discussion specifically within the pages of JRME.These invited Research Commentaries would by no means exhaust what could be said about the themes addressed in the March issue, but, if we were lucky, we might prime the pump, so to speak, for even more submissions-Research Reports and Commentaries-that would help the general readership of JRME take stock of the state of the art in equity-focused research in our field.1 A guest editor handled the review of Battey et al. (2022) because the first author was, at the time of submission, a member of the Editorial Panel.JRME policy dictates that such submissions are handled by a guest editor to prevent the appearance of a conflict of interest for the Editor-in-Chief.
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4308076760