Establishing a community of practice in a secondary mathematics classroom

Abstract

Every classroom is culturally diverse. In the upper set of a selective grammar school, it may be that the diversity is much narrower than in a mixed ability group of the inner-city comprehensive. But there will still be a diversity. Cultural diversity is not ethnic diversity as such, nor is it religious pluralism as such. Cultural diversity is just as much the television programmes that we watch, the newspapers we read, the music we appreciate, the sporting pastimes we follow, the eat-ins or take-aways we do or do not order, even the drinks we buy and the places where we drink them. It is the same at every level of education, from the nursery to the university. We are indivisibly part of a multicultural society, a multicultural world. As Lynch et al. (1992, p. 5) say: If we consider the overlapping dimensions of cultural diversity which have seized the headlines even in the recent past-racial, religious, linguistic, regional, ethnic, gender, age, social class and more recently caste-we cannot avoid the conclusion that, not only are most nation states culturally diverse, but that the world’s population as a whole manifests a rich diversity across a large number of overlapping cultural factors and dimensions, representing a pluralism of pluralisms. Elsewhere, they reflect that ‘there is not, and probably never will be, one perception of cultural diversity, even within the same cultural context, social stratum or nation state’ (vol. 1, p. 445).

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