Learners co-creating mathematics metaknowledge and expanding curriculum on YouTube

Abstract This article has emerged from a humble attempt to respond to the repeated calls of First Nations peoples to ‘listen’. Listening to calls to action from some Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers, we begin to consider possible implications for the future of mathematics education. In this article we aim to pay attention to Professor Martin Nakata’s recommendation of metaknowledge. We argue that his call for including more disciplinary metaknowledge in school education is relevant to and important for mathematics learning/teaching, particularly given its reputation as objective, transcendent knowledge, and the way that Australian national curriculum documents maintain a particularly sharp disciplinary boundary when it comes to mathematics. We then explore an example of implemented curriculum shared by celebrity teacher Eddie Woo on YouTube that starts interrupting that disciplinary boundary, taking the video and comments together as an assemblage and emergent text where teachers and learners are co-creating knowledge about calculus. This paper focuses on foregrounding disciplinary metaknowledges in school mathematics, acknowledging the involvement of all learners, seeing the teacher labour that often goes unrecognised, and provoking greater consideration of Martin Nakata's conceptualisation of metaknowledge in the context of mathematics curriculum.