Abstract
South Africa is not just one among many comparable settings for mathematics education research and Jill Adler is not an ordinary mathematics education researcher who, her special prominence in the field notwithstanding, does basically the same type of work as all other members of this worldwide community. For the last two decades, South Africa has been trying to shed its old identity and to design a new one, and Jill is an activist deeply involved in this process. She was an activist even before being a researcher and this former activity colors whatever she has been doing since then. In fact, Jill turns everything into activism, research included.
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Notes
- 1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activism, retrieved on 26 May 2014.
- 2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research, retrieved on 26 May 2014. This definition of research is quoted from OECD (2015) Frascati Manual: proposed standard practice for surveys on research and experimental development, 6th edition (retrieved 27 May 2012 from www.oecd.org/sti/frascatimanual).
- 3.
Hamsa comes from an Indian family that moved to England when she was 5 years old, before moving to South Africa in 2005, and Anna who grew up in a Jewish family in Poland, has lived in Israel since she was eighteen.
- 4.
The topic of the lesson was translating numbers from decimal to scientific notation.
- 5.
This is when, under the presidency of Frederik de Klerk, apartheid was officially abolished.
- 6.
As it happens, Nadine Gordimer passed away just as we were finishing writing this text, on 13 July 2014.
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Sfard, A., Venkat, H. (2016). Researcher as Activist: A Conversation. In: Phakeng, M., Lerman, S. (eds) Mathematics Education in a Context of Inequity, Poverty and Language Diversity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38824-3_7
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