Critical mathematics education in Thai secondary classrooms: Barriers, opportunities, and implications for urban context-based instruction

Information from the abstract

Critical mathematics education (CME) emerged in Western contexts that assume students will voice dissent and openly challenge mathematics as political. This qualitative phase 1 study examines how Thai secondary mathematics educators understand and enact CME in a hierarchical, examination-driven setting where those assumptions do not necessarily hold. Through semistructured interviews with five scholars and seven teachers, alongside observations of project-based instruction, thematic analysis produced three constructs. Depoliticization is the institutional process that removes political content from critical frameworks while retaining the language of critical thinking. Suppressed silence, inferred from teacher accounts and classroom observations rather than direct student data, describes critical awareness that students may hold but have learned not to voice. Gentle criticality describes critiques expressed through quiet questioning and community-oriented inquiry rather than open confrontation. As provisional constructs, they offer a vocabulary for theorizing CME in collectivist contexts not fully addressed by Western frameworks, grounding subsequent model development.

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Related topics: Mathematics Education and Teaching Techniques · Mathematics Education and Programs · Science Education and Pedagogy