Mathematics Education for Sustainable Futures

Call for Papers for an Article Collection of Educational Studies in Mathematics

Our world is characterised by complexity, uncertainty, vulnerability, movement, and

informality. The sustainability of life on the planet—for all peoples and living organisms—is
threatened. This precarity as evidenced by related issues of climate changes; chemical
pollution; water and food insecurity; biodiversity loss; public health emergencies; poverty;
inequality; unemployment; migration; totalitarianism, discrimination, and loss of voice. The
world has long been experienced as such by many, indeed a traditionally marginalised
majority. Yet the stark evidence of our precarity, presented, for example, by the recent global
health pandemic and extreme weather events, have led to wider recognition within the
mathematics education community of the need for mathematics education to account for its
role in the world, and to (re)evaluate its ‘reach’. With a sense that the pace of change is
outstripping our knowledge of events lending a growing urgency to this need for mathematics
education to respond. For this is a world that mathematics education has represented and
continues to represent as mathematically ‘calculable’ or ‘formattable’, that is, a world that
can be described, understood and predicted using a supposedly neutral and ‘global’
mathematics (Mbembe, 2021; Skovsmose, 2011). This is a world in which mathematics
education is commonly and unquestioningly considered a necessary individual and social
‘good’.

A number of theoretical traditions in mathematics education have been and are increasingly
reckoning with mathematics education’s pasts, presents and futures, and are offering critical
responses. These traditions span classroom practice, curriculum, structures such as culture
and race, and wider methodological and theoretical considerations, with peoples and/or the
Earth and living environment variously foregrounded and backgrounded (Coles, Solares, Le
Roux, 2024). These related traditions—illustrated here with existing edited compilations and
reviews—include, but are not limited to: critical mathematics education, CME (e.g., Alrø,
Ravn, & Valero, 2010; Andersson & Barwell, 2021); mathematics for social
justice/peace/democracy (e.g., Vithal & Skovsmose, 2012); socio-critical modelling (e.g.,
Kaiser & Sririman, 2006); ethnomathematics (e.g., Powell & Frankenstein, 1997; Rosa et al.,
2017); scholarship on culturally responsive mathematics education and Indigenous ways of
knowing (e.g., Nicol et al., 2020); and decolonial and antiracist perspectives (e.g., Martin,
Valoyes-Chavez, & Valero, 2024). Within each of these traditions we do identify the topic of
sustainability as increasingly coming to the fore, to name a few articles: Hauge and Barwell
(2017), and Ödmo, Björklund Boistrup, and Chronaki (2023) in CME; Steffensen and Kacerja
(2021), and Basu and Panorkou (2020) in socio-critical modelling; de Mattos and de Mattos
(2020) and Eglash (2023) in ethnomathematics; and Gutiérrez (2017) and Kulago et al. (2021)
using Indigenous ways of knowing. In addition, mathematics education scholars are recruiting
ideas traditionally thought of as ‘outside’ of the field of mathematics, such as (eco)feminist,
ecocritical, ecojustice, decolonial, new materialist and posthumanist ideas (e.g., Boylan, 2017;
Chronaki & Lazaridou, 2023; de Freitas & Sinclair, 2014; Khan et al., 2021) to conceptualise
socio-ecological relations in mathematics education.

A new Educational Studies in Mathematics article collection aims to build on and make a
particular contribution to this growing area of work. We build on the premise that all areas of
mathematics education need to be concerned with/for sustainable futures, that is,
considerations of what socio-ecological precarity means for mathematics education and how
mathematics education might respond. We invite educational studies in mathematics in the
form of empirical and theoretical papers that respond to the question: How do we
practise/imagine mathematics education—defined broadly to include curriculum,
knowledge, pedagogy, teacher education, language, modelling, technology, theory,
methodology, and so on—in a mathematics education for sustainable futures?

We call for papers from a range of contexts and voices in the community, including
conversations across contexts and voices. These might address, for example:
● Consideration of how sustainable futures are relevant to established topics in
mathematics education, for example (not limited to this list): curriculum, teacher
education, modelling, technology, task design, language, specific areas of
mathematics (e.g., statistics, geometry).
● Proposals for, and examples of, change in mathematics pedagogy, curriculum or
knowledge that enable mathematics education to offer a response for sustainable
futures.
● Consideration of student learning of mathematics in contexts where questions of
sustainability are also addressed.
● Interdisciplinary work, involving mathematics education.
● Research into how global ecological crises are experienced differently in different
regions (and the inequalities such differences can expose) and the ethical
implications for, and involvements of, mathematics education.
● Critical reflection on the aims of mathematics education and the politics of
sustainability in relation to mathematics education.
● Critical analysis of how issues of sustainability in mathematics education may be
(in)visibilised in particular fields of mathematics education or contexts.
● Philosophical, theoretical and methodological issues, for mathematics education
research, of global precarity and futures.

A key feature of this article collection is the recognition that the above-mentioned condition
of our world has been and continues to be experienced inequitably within the mathematics
education community and that notions such as ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’
are not neutral. That is, our interest in ‘sustainable futures’ cannot be separated from
questions of: ‘Sustainability’ for whom and of what? Who decides and from where? And why
now? Authors will thus need to identify their own conceptualisation of ‘sustainability’, or (we
imagine) may choose to critique uses of the term and offer an alternative. Even if authors use
a well-established tradition on sustainability (e.g., the United Nations Sustainable
Development Goals), they should justify the significance and relevance of their choice.

Submissions may be full length ESM papers (7000 words not including references, tables,
figures, etc.) or shorter (e.g., 5000 words). There will be opportunity for revision, with
feedback from editors and reviewers, so do not be afraid to take risks. The editors request
that authors send extended abstracts (via email) as early as possible in the writing process, to
receive feedback prior to submission. The editors are also happy to receive emailed questions
about the call.
Timeline
1. Ongoing: Submit an extended abstract (maximum 500 words) to one of the editors as soon
as possible, using the email addresses below.
2. Next: After receiving feedback from the editors, prepare a full manuscript for submission.
Submit into the ESM review process, selecting “Mathematics Education for Sustainable
Futures” when asked for the type of paper. We will continue to review submissions using
established ESM peer review protocols and publish accepted papers online immediately when
they are ready. (Please ensure that you follow the guidelines for ESM papers:
https://link.springer.com/journal/10649/submission-guidelines.)
3. 31st October, 2025: Final date for submission of papers to be considered for the article
collection.

We foresee about 10 to 15 articles in the collection. Since this is a special collection (as
opposed to a special issue), an article that is accepted for the collection will appear in the
first possible printed issue of ESM where it can appear. However, all the articles in the
collection will be collated in a unique space on the ESM website. This approach allows
authors to respond relatively urgently to the pressing questions asked of mathematics
education, to keep the concerns in focus over time, and collectively build the field.

Special issue collection guest editors: Alf Coles (alf.coles@bristol.ac.uk), Kate le Roux
(kate.leroux@uct.ac.za), Mariam Makramalla (mariam.makramalla@ngu.edu.eg), and
David Wagner (dwagner@unb.ca).

References
Alrø, H., Ravn, O., & Valero, P. (Eds.). (2010). Critical mathematics education: Past, present and
future. Brill.
Andersson, A., & Barwell, R. (Eds.). (2021). Applying critical mathematics education. Brill.
Basu, D., & Panorkou,N. (2020). Utilizing mathematics to examine sea level rise as an environmental
and a social issue. Proceedings of the 42nd Meeting of the North American Chapter of the
International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (pp. 1064–1068), Mazatlán,
Mexico.
Boylan, M. (2017). Towards a mathematics education for ecological selves: Pedagogies for relational
knowing and being. Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal, 32.
https://education.exeter.ac.uk/research/centres/stem/publications/pmej/pome32/Boylan-
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Chronaki, A., & Lazaridou, E. (2023). Subverting epistemicide through ‘the commons’: Mathematics
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Indigenous knowledge and ethnomathematics (pp. 161–179). Springer
Coles, A., Solares, A., & Le Roux, K. (2024). Socio-ecological gestures of mathematics education.
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