Affect in Mathematics Education: an introduction

Affect has been a focus of increasing interest in mathematics education research. However, affect has generally been seen as ‘other’ than mathematical thinking, as just not part of it. Indeed, throughout modern history, reasoning has normally seemed to require the suppression, or the control of, emotion (Walkerdine, 1988). Moreover, the term ‘affect’ has been interpreted in different ways and a need to increase cohesion and communication between different theoretical frameworks has become obvious. To increase cohesion within this field, four different theoretical frameworks were brought together into a discussion at a Research Forum at PME 28, Bergen (Hannula et al., 2004). This Special Issue is an extension and elaboration of that work