Ethics in Mathematics Education: A Foundation in the Fullness of Life

Issues in mathematics education tend to be approached from intellectual–constructivist perspectives, including those pertaining to learning (cognition), the role of the body, or, at the heart of this volume, the questions of ethics. Over the course of my long career as a researcher, my positions on these issues evolved into a radically different way of approaching pertinent issues in our field by taking the fullness of life as the fundamental starting point for the consideration of cognition (learning), affect, body, or ethics. In this chapter, I sketch how this different perspective constitutes a bottom-up approach to ethics grounded in the lived human relations of the everyday mathematics classroom. An excerpt from a videotaped eleventh-grade mathematics lesson is used as material and ground to articulate this different take on ethics in mathematics education.