Abandoning Hope? What Mathematics Education Researchers Say About Why They Do What They Do

A research study was designed to understand how a group of mathematics education researchers describe their scholarly work—why they do it and how their research relates to a specific conceptualization of culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP). In the analysis of interviews with 17 international mathematics education researchers, we distilled the scholars’ descriptions of their hopes for their scholarly action. The themes of these distillations include seven imperatives for research action: ‘communicate’, ‘investigate’, ‘make’, ‘change and move’, ‘position’, ‘humanize’, and ‘reflect’. Drawing on the interview data, each of these action themes is elaborated on and synthesized into action-focused questions (AFQs), intended as prompts for like-minded scholars to use in reflection on and choices for intentional scholarly action. Our rationale for focusing on why scholars do what they do is grounded in our claim that mathematics education research could have a greater impact on the practices in schools if researchers focused more explicitly on unpacking the why of their research.