Professional Development
Identities and mathematics
Doing mathematics and becoming or being a mathematician are about more than just the subject content - the way we feel about mathematics, how we and others conceptualise it against our identities, and what we think it says about us to be good at mathematics all may provide help or hindrance to studying it. In this video, Lucy Rycroft-Smith, from the explicit standpoint of a queer female(ish) mathematician, considers ideas about representation, identity and belonging in maths and what the implications might be for us as learners and teachers at every level.
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About Lucy Rycroft-Smith
Lucy Rycroft-Smith is a writer, researcher, speaker and designer in mathematics education, working at Cambridge Mathematics as a Framework Designer and Editor and writing Espressos (filtered maths education research for teachers).
She is studying for her PhD at the University of Cambridge, considering ideas of knowledge brokering – how, what, when, where and why we communicate research to mathematics teachers. Her other research interests include gender, sexualities and identity, feminism, decolonisation, curriculum design, board gaming, teaching discrete mathematics, representations of mathematics, maths and the arts, and professional development. She is the author of The Equal Classroom: Life-Changing Thinking About Gender (2019) and co-editor of Flip the System UK: A Teachers’ Manifesto (2017).
Ages: Primary, Secondary