ABSTRACT
Probably in doing that you will have used some terms which compared students against others; you will have classifi ed students according to some criteria. Classifying students is something that teachers and schools engage in all of the time; ranking, grouping, setting, allowing some onto courses, keeping others out and so on. Classifi cation is not only a fundamental process of mathematical activity, but also is fundamental to mathematics education itself, at least as we know it in England. Yet there is a particular type of classifi cation that is of interest to us in this chapter – sorting students by their social and economic backgrounds. So we begin this chapter by asking the following questions:
• How do young people become classifi ed through mathematics education? • How do our professional practices (our pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, etc.) con-
tribute to this? • How might we respond in light of this awareness of our collusion in such classifi catory
processes?
