Tony Brown
Tony Brown's research examines maths education and teacher education through contemporary social theory and he has written ten books and many journal articles in these areas. He completed three projects for the Economic and Social Research Council on the theme of Primary Mathematics Teacher Education. Tony co-organised the three conferences on Mathematics Education and Contemporary Theory. Tony has also had a long-standing interest in professionally oriented research
Subjects: Education, Philosophy
Biography
Publications: https://www2.mmu.ac.uk/esri/people/profile/index.php?id=1145Tony Brown's research examines maths education and teacher education through contemporary social theory and he has written ten books and many journal articles in these areas.
He completed three projects for the Economic and Social Research Council on the theme of Primary Mathematics Teacher Education. Tony co-organised the three conferences on Mathematics Education and Contemporary Theory, held at MMU and co-edited special issues of Educational Studies in Mathematics from the material that arose. Tony has also had a long-standing interest in professionally oriented research, typically carried out by senior professionals working on doctoral studies analysing their own practice. His own students have researched areas as diverse as mathematics education, teacher education, science education, emergency medicine, police training, emotion in special needs education, educational links with industry, English education, race and ethnicity, popular music education, global education in development contexts, early years education, school leadership, and digital media. Seven of these doctoral projects have led to books. Originally from London, Tony attended the Universities of Kent at Canterbury and Exeter before returning to central London where he taught mathematics for 3 years at Holland Park School. The next 3 years were spent as a Mathematics Teacher Educator for Volunteer Services Overseas in Dominica in the Caribbean. In 1987, he completed his PhD at Southampton University, which focused on language usage in mathematics classrooms, based on data collected in Dominica and London. After a spell as the Mathematics Coordinator in a middle school on the Isle of Wight, Tony moved to Manchester Metropolitan University (then polytechnic) in 1989 to spend some more years in teacher education. He became a Professor at MMU in 2000. During 2003 and 2004, Tony was based at the University of Waikato where he was the first Professor of Mathematics Education in New Zealand. Since then he has been back at MMU writing, teaching and carving out a miserable existence of unsuccessfully applying for research grants.
Areas of Research / Professional Expertise
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Mathematics education, teacher education, professional education
Personal Interests
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Psychoanalytical theory, e.g. Lacan, Zizek
Philosophy, e.g Badiou
Cinema
Websites
Books
Articles
The fantasy of the populist disease and the educational cure
Published: Jul 25, 2020 by British Educational Research Journal
Authors: Sant and Brown
Subjects:
Political Science, Education, Psycholinguistics
The populist turn has produced contrasting conceptions of education. Research has suggested that individuals educated to university level are unlikely to support populist discourses. Meanwhile, populism is often understood as a social illness or disease that needs to be cured through education. This article argues that both populist and anti‐populist discourses are fantasies in which education comprises an ideological grip.
Thinking with certainty or with doubt: a Lacanian theorisation of discursive knowledge in teacher education
Published: Apr 20, 2017 by Discourse
Authors: Hanley and Brown
Subjects:
Education, English Language & Linguistics
The paper presents a theorisation of pedagogic knowledge formation, as a continuous attempt to understand the positions in discourse we occupy. The paper documents some participatory practitioner research by teacher educators centred on a course development initiative for student teachers of English, at an English university. Students researched their experiences of becoming a teacher within a course that was largely school-based.
Developing a university contribution to teacher education: creating an analytical space for learning narratives
Published: May 02, 2016 by Journal of curriculum studies
Authors: Hanley and Brown
Subjects:
Education, English Language & Linguistics
This paper tracks a group of prospective teachers making the transition from undergraduate to teacher on a one-year school-based postgraduate course. The study employs a practitioner research methodological framework where teacher learning is understood as a process of developing and evaluating self-representations. Students persistently revised a story of ‘Who I am becoming’, referenced to evolving notions of pedagogic subject knowledge.
Sliding subject positions: knowledge and teacher educators
Published: Aug 07, 2015 by British Educational Research Journal
Authors: Brown, Rowley and Smith
Subjects:
Education, Psycholinguistics
This paper reports on a wider study that considers the experience of university teacher educators adjusting to new academic and operational conditions. The paper analyses resultant conceptions of subject knowledge and of teacher education emerging through this changing interface and how these conceptions are variously located across staffing arrangements.
Rethinking research in teacher education
Published: Jan 01, 2014 by British Journal of Educational Studies
Authors: Brown, Rowley and Smith
Subjects:
Education
The expansion of school-based teacher training is impacting on the practice of universities, schools and trainees. University tutors and managers were interviewed on how they experienced working in partnership with schools and how this impacted on the composition of their work. They variously reported on how their sense of professional purpose had been challenged as a result of changing expectations. Their involvement in research is used as a barometer of these changes.