Alternative Understanding of Equity and Their Relationship to Ethics

This paper discusses three distinct, yet overlapping and often exchangeable discourses of equity, diversity and social justice in mathematics education. Like all discourses in education, they are social constructs and have been subjected to development and critique from a variety of perspectives. This paper focuses on poststructuralist discourses, and in particular that of identity, that renders the traditional understandings of these constructs as problematic for policy and practice. The paper proposes that the discourse of ethics lies at the heart of the three discourses, and in turn places these discourses at the heart of mathematics education