POWER AND POVERTY – WHOSE, WHERE, AND WHY?: SCHOOL MATHEMATICS, CONTEXT AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF “DISADVANTAGE”

This paper compares the discourse and practice of school mathematics in two socio-economically different school contexts in post-apartheid South Africa. It addresses the relationship between constructed “difference ” and “pedagogized disadvantage.” In other terms, it looks at the way in which certain students, spoken-of in terms of “deficit ” and “disadvantage”, are afforded differentiated school mathematics discourse that situates them in terms of “failure”. Consequently, these socially constructed students are not provided with access to pedagogic or socio-economic empowerment. The paper examines the role of social context in the elaboration of social difference discourses and their recontextualization into mathematics in ways that recruit psychologizing positions, thus pathologizing students and producing disabling pedagogies. A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE. The paper draws on two similarly conducted studies in South African secondary schools. Each study reports on one particular school. Each school is situated in a very different socio-economic context – one affluent, one impoverished. While critical discourse analysis was used to interrogate the range of positions and voices informing the two studies, the theoretical framework draws on the interrelated ideas of discourse, subjectivity, social context and ideology. It provides a sociological interpretation of the role of context and agency in the way in which mathematics is constituted in the two locations, the identities that are constructed in context, and, concomitantly, the ideological positions evoked, including the recontextualization of discourses of psychology in the mathematics classroom in different contexts. The paper compares the two schooling contexts in the two studies. Consequently, a comparison of the two studies permits an examination of the various ways in which these positions are differently or similarly realized across the two schooling contexts