Who are the actors and who are the acted-ons? An analysis of news media reporting on mathematics education

Abstract

While there are several studies analysing how mathematics education is portrayed in news media discourses, there has been little examination of the construction of different stakeholders (e.g. teachers, parents, curricula). In this paper, we report our analysis of a corpus of Canadian newspaper reports on mathematics education, focusing on the underlying construction of different stakeholders. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of regimes of truth, we show how news media construct a “truth” that portrays different stakeholders as either actors or acted-ons working for or against individual or national mathematical performance. We explain these findings with reference to the general media framing of mathematics education in the corpus.