Towards an Epistemological Map of Curriculum in School Mathematics

While being proclaimed as a move to accountability and higher standards, current educational trends in the United States, England and Australia are undoubtedly ideologically driven, influenced by underlying economic rationalist philosophies that owe much to deeper epistemological beliefs about what counts as legitimate knowledge. However existing discussions of epistemology in mathematics education tend to categorise knowledge using binaries such as qualitative or quantitative, hard or soft, pure or applied. In this paper, I describe a technique that may be useful to conduct a more nuanced analysis, and use this technique to carry out a preliminary mapping of one aspect of the proposed Australian National Curriculum in Mathematics.