Toward an Ethical Attitude in Mathematics Education Research Writing

In this article, the authors propose a set of multi-level questions as a guide for developing an ethical attitude in researcher–participant and researcher–researcher relations during the research writing process. Drawing on the sociopolitical turn in mathematics education, the authors view these relations in terms of power and positionings, in the dialectic between the micro-level of research writing and the wider, macro-level context of mathematics education. The authors illustrate the use of the proposed questions through a back-and-forth dialogue. The dialogue draws on experiences from a writing collaboration in which the authors—“the researchers”—wrote up for publication research conducted in their respective contexts of the Political North and Political South. Both research projects focused on how mathematics students—“the participants”—narrate and hence position themselves and are narrated and positioned by mathematics education and sociopolitical discourses in research publications.