Abstract:
The theme that runs through this work is three-fold. First, there is a quality that some students possess that enables them to arrive at the academic table better positioned to take advantage of our educational offerings. This work seeks to forward for general vocabulary usage a name for that quality so that we as educational researchers can acquire it as a tool not only in the field of mathematics research, but analogously in all subject areas. The term being introduced is pedagogical capital. Secondly, as educational standards in mathematics become the rubric upon which the success or failure of teachers and schools are measured, it is important to consider whether these curriculum standards contain the seeds of social justice or hegemony. If mathematical standards convey an unconscious privilege to one group at the expense of another, then equity is at issue. And finally, as a new and emerging theoretical framework, the concept of education in this work uses Pierre Bourdieu's sociological idea of a firmly grounded, true mixed-methods approach of using both qualitative and quantitative data to highlight one detail in the overall picture of what is currently the portrait of mathematics education.
