Changing classroom cultures, Not Changing Mathematics
The data that I have discussed here show that school mathematics is not as straightforwardly "pro-separate" as Becker suggests. While it has a surface emphasis on right answers, formality and certainty which is reflected in the discourses of natural ability and speed which circulate within the classroom community, it also supports a creativity and connection-making which some students access and incorporate into a positive mathematics identity. In Black's primary school data these students seem to be predominantly middle-class boys who participate creatively and are rewarded for doing so by further dialogue with the teacher which not only signifies their position in the content of their talk but also in its dialogic and intersubjective structure. The top-set boys in my secondary school sample described themselves as good at mathematics and similarly positioned themselves as engaged in an apprentice-type relationship with the teacher as epistemic resource rather than social authority. Top-set girl on the other hand appear to be caught between an institutional positioning as good at mathematics (i.e. they are in the top set) and a range of discursive positions which invoke gender differentiation in behavior and thinking and the particular performance marker of speed. At secondary school and university they may aim for creativity but find it difficult to sustain positive identities--- their accounts are dominated by a fragility in terms of the constant danger of finding themselves out of their depth in terms of their own standards for understanding and performance crucially and others' recognition of that performance. Boys and men on the other hand sustain positive identities despite, for some, their arguably limited and limiting approach to mathematics.