Clive Kanes’s research while affiliated with King's College London and other places

Within mathematics education research, the responses to the Programme for International Student Assessment’s (PISA’s) international testing regime tend to accept its framework and results as necessary points of reference, even when offering a critical reinterpretation or challenging national policy discourses based on PISA. In this article, we offer a different approach to the critique of PISA, drawing on theoretical tools provided by Bernstein and Foucault, to ask what the PISA regime achieves. Our understanding of this achievement encompasses both the production of knowledge structures and the production of students, teachers and other agents as subjects. We propose that the theoretical approach we offer provides a methodological entry point into analysis of the texts comprising the PISA mathematics regime. Analysis of a single PISA item is used to illustrate the insights that may be gained from such a theoretical lens. Such insights into the logic of PISA have the potential to allow us better to understand and hence contest the role that PISA and other large-scale assessment regimes may play in global and local policy discourses.

This chapter explains the purpose of the book in terms of headline challenges currently facing professionalism, and makes explicit its intended audience: professional practitioners, concerned members of the public, policy makes and managers, and scholars and students. Headline challenges are identified as uncertainties relating to the nature of professionalism, building public trust and confidence in professionalism, and meeting the needs of professional education and training. Arguably two of the most influential theoretical frameworks for understanding professionalism are those that come from the sociology of Max Weber and Talcott Parsons, and those that take the notion of the knowledge base as seminal, such as Michael Eraut. The chapter briefly looks at these, and outlines some of their strengths and the problems each have in grappling with headline challenges to professionalism. These discussions provide a background to explain the rationale for the title of this volume. The contents of the contributing chapters are then introduced, and the process of relating these works to each other, taken up further in Chapter 10, is commenced. KeywordsProfessionalism-Knowledge-Ethics-Identity-Development-Market-Rational-legal bureaucracy-Organisation-Elaboration

This chapter aims to explore ways to meet prominent headline challenges to professionalism. The first part of the chapter refers to aspects of a report published by the Royal College of Physicians of London, Doctors in society: Medical professionalism in a changing world (2005), commissioned to explore directions for change in professional practice. Though not a full-scale analysis, the chapter relates some of its key features to practical and theoretical issues that have recently arisen in the literature concerning ethics and boundary-crossing especially. These have implications for the headline challenges. The second part of the chapter draws together the contributed chapters in this volume which can potentially address the headline challenges. Main themes that are found to emerge include specificity, holism, plasticity and illimitability, boundary-crossing and hybridity. The contribution of these towards building new forms of practical and theoretical understanding that positively address headline challenges is explored. KeywordsProfessionalism-Trust-Professional education-Identity-Knowledge-Ethics-Specificity-Boundary-crossing-Holism-Plasticity-Illimitability-Professional practice

This chapter is based on the notion that Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) work with similar, although characteristically different concepts of ‘community of practice’ and our goal is to compare and contrast these. We point out the relative strengths and weaknesses of each, illustrating our arguments with research examples drawn from the literature. We conclude by indicating ways in which each perspective informs research in the mathematics education community and to directions in which they might be developed to support our understanding of teaching and learning across a range of contexts.

This article considers developments in activity theory from a theory developmental point of view. It starts with Fichte's concept of activity and works from there through Marx's materialist, collective, dialectical approach to philosophical questions to those of Vygotsky and Leontiev around the socio-genesis of concept formation in psychology. Engeström's major recent contributions are also noted, especially as they lead activity theory into a more interventionary form. The article makes use of concepts elicited in these seminal accounts to suggest directions for a more contemporary take on the theory. To this end four problems around activity theory are posed. The article suggests the need for, consistent with Marx's vision in the 'Theses of Feuerbach', a fusion of activity theory and critical social science.

University of the Peloponnese This paper explores the regime of rationality which PISA helps to reinforce. Bringing together certain approaches of Bernstein and Foucault, three levels of analysis, relating to social categories and communication, the self, and government are identified. A single PISA mathematics item is analysed, illustrating these levels of analysis and their interrelationships. We find evidence that Kenway's concept of the technopreneur as an agent of cultural and economic production might help in our analysis. The paper reports the first tentative steps towards a research agenda that brings together key contemporary theoretical resources in educational research.