ABSTRACT
When we think about issues of choice in mathematics education, we perhaps most readily focus on those particular moments where people make decisions, or decisions concerning them are made by others, that have observable outcomes. An obvious example is the choice made by learners to continue to study mathematics when the subject is no longer compulsory for them. However, sociocultural, discursive, and psychoanalytical enquiry (see e.g., Boaler & Greeno, 2000; T. Brown, Jones, & Bibby, 2004; Mendick, 2002; Solomon, 2007a; Walkerdine, 1988) all indicate that such moments of apparent decision are grounded in ongoing processes. In considering the issue of choice, we begin from a concern/interest in these processes, the experiences of maturation, of development and change, and the factors that are involved in this. In particular, we are concerned with how people themselves make sense of their experience of being in the world. This includes the relationship between a complex, phenomenologically interior world that frequently has hidden or unconscious, and invariably emotional, motivations and causes, and articulated human choice.
