Love, Community, Errantry: Relational Approaches Toward Mathematical Mistakes

In this article we explore ways of approaching what educators and researchers perceive as mistakes that are consistent with views of mathematics that tolerate ambiguity, contradiction, and multiple possible truths. The approaches we describe draw on works within and beyond the field of mathematics education and detail theories from biologist Humberto Maturana, community organizers Bob Moses and Ella Baker, and poet-philosopher Edouard Glissant. These alternative theoretical perspectives are distinctly relational in their approach. They can build on the field’s current conceptualizations of pedagogical responses to errors in ways that attend to calls for broadening what it means to do mathematics and be mathematical.