Layers of Ethical Awareness: Mathematics Teachers’ Concerns on Including Socio-political Issues

The revised Norwegian curriculum emphasises developing students’ ethical awareness as a core value in education, applying to all school subjects. This requires that teachers, who are the facilitators of students’ ethical awareness, are aware of ethical aspects of issues themselves and that they are ethically aware of how to take their relationship with students into account when ethically loaded issues are discussed, and at the same time having responsibilities regarding curriculum. There is limited research on students and teachers’ ethical awareness in mathematics education and how it can be understood and developed. In this chapter, we look at what teachers’ ethical awareness related to harm might be when working with socio-political issues in mathematics classrooms, issues which can foster students’ ethical awareness. We lean on several empirical studies where harmful issues are included in mathematics education. Three studies are related to teacher courses, where the body mass index (BMI) is the topic in the first two studies, and a xenophobic video is discussed in the third. The last study is on preservice teachers carrying out a project on sustainable development related to clothing during their practicum. Our analytic framework is based on critical mathematics education literature, particularly within ethics and concepts of harm. The results show that discussing and working with socio-political issues in classrooms evoke teachers’ ethical awareness. They weigh the importance of working with these harmful issues, where mathematics has different roles, against showing care for the students, as such issues are sensitive for some students. Some teachers express insecurity in facing ethical challenges, which suggests that ethics and techniques to handle challenging situations should be addressed in teacher education in mathematics. We further show how the results offer relevant insight and perspectives useful for developing teaching and learning mathematics related to socio-political issues.