[Maths-Education] Note on Special Issue. Can Artificial Intelligence Supply Ethnomathematics?

Wed Oct 21 10:48:55 BST 2026

Can Artificial Intelligence Supply Ethnomathematics?
A note to colleagues on the Frontiers Research Topic AI for Culturally Grounded Mathematics Teaching
Paul Ernest, University of Exeter. 21 October 2026
Why I am circulating this. As an established researcher I receive frequent invitations to contribute papers to journals I have never heard of, and sometimes to edit special issues of them. I decline them all, having enough on my plate. I have never received an invitation of this kind from one of the well-known mathematics education journals, unless it came through an individual I already knew. So when the present call for papers reached me through the Jerry Becker mathematics education information listing, I read it with a little scepticism, and I decided to share my conclusions with colleagues in Britain.
I am not claiming that this is a bad journal, nor that this is grey or predatory publishing. I don't know. My point is narrower. Looking into the details, it does seem that generating money is a major concern of the journal and of the publisher’s operation. I leave readers to make their own judgement on that. What follows is meant as a thoughtful warning rather than an accusation. I have written a more detailed analysis, again trying to be fair and balanced, which is available from me on request at p.ernest at exeter.ac.uk.
The call. The Research Topic invites papers on using artificial intelligence to generate culturally grounded mathematics teaching, drawing on ethnomathematics and Indigenous knowledge, with teachers mediating what the machine produces. The deadline is May 2027 and authors pay. The call is well written and asks sensible questions. However, the project behind it seems to me implausible, and not for technical reasons.
Is it intrinsically plausible? Ethnomathematics is the study of the mathematical practices of particular peoples. Its founding point is that such knowledge has an owner and a setting, and that the question of who may speak for it belongs to the subject rather than standing in its way. A language model cannot meet that condition in principle. What it knows of any people’s mathematics it has from the published record, which is overwhelmingly Anglophone and Northern, and which is precisely the record ethnomathematics exists to correct. It cannot therefore supply ethnomathematical knowledge. It can only recirculate what that record already contains, in the confident voice of something new.
Three things follow. The machine has no standing in any community, so it cannot seek consent, cannot be corrected by the people it describes, and cannot share authorship or benefit; the charge the field has long made against itself, that it gathers other peoples’ mathematics and gives nothing back, applies to it absolutely. Where it invents, the result is not a scholarly slip to be corrected in a later edition, because a fabricated practice attributed to a named people enters the literature and is then cited. And teacher mediation, the safeguard the call offers, cannot do the work asked of it, since the characteristic failure of these systems is fluent plausibility, which is exactly what a teacher from outside the culture has no means of detecting.
A narrower version of the project is worth pursuing. Teachers are already using these tools, and documenting what they do with them, and where the output fails, is real research. It is not what the title promises.
The call’s own evidence. Of the eight works the call cites, two cannot be found in any database or anywhere on the open web, and one is described as reporting findings it does not report. Every citation carrying a positive claim about learning fails in one of these ways, and every citation that survives checking supplies background or a caution. A call warning scholars that machines produce culturally plausible but unreliable content rests part of its own case on references of exactly that character.
What it earns. The journal published 1,689 articles in 2025 at fees of 1,750 to 2,195 Swiss francs. After allowance for free editorial items and for the publisher’s own stated waiver rate, that gives an estimated income for this one journal of about 2.9 million Swiss francs, some 2.6 million pounds. It is one of 222 journals. The publisher’s total fee income has been independently estimated at 258 million US dollars for 2023, from an output of more than seventy thousand articles a year.
Warning. Publication here should not be undertaken lightly. The fee is payable whether or not the collection proves worth joining, a collection of this kind is judged by its weakest paper, and the research funding bodies of Finland, France and Malaysia have each moved to discount or to stop paying for this publisher’s output. Work of this quality can be placed without charge in the Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, Research in Mathematics Education, Educational Studies in Mathematics or the Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal. I'll leave it to your own judgement whether it is an investment in time and money worth making.

Best wishes

Paul

_________
Paul Ernest
Emeritus Professor, Education, Exeter University, Exeter, EX1 2LU, UK
Homepage  https://sites.exeter.ac.uk/pmej/  for The Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal. No. 43 (March 2026) out now

P. Ernest (2024) The Ethics of Authority and Control in Mathematics Education:  From Naked Power to Hidden Ideology. In P. Ernest, Ed. (2024) Ethics and Mathematics Education The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Springer.

Revised entry at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ernest
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From: Maths-Education <maths-education-bounces at lists.nottingham.ac.uk> on behalf of Peter Cave via Maths-Education <maths-education at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
Sent: 28 September 2026 08:54
To: maths-education at lists.nottingham.ac.uk <maths-education at lists.nottingham.ac.uk>
Subject: [Maths-Education] Catherine Lewis, online seminar (7 Oct) on problem-solving and lesson study in maths education

CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organisation. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognise the sender and know the content is safe.

All are welcome to an exciting online seminar organised by Geoff Wake and myself, featuring Dr Catherine Lewis, renowned researcher on mathematics teaching and learning, Lesson Study, and Japanese education. Advance registration is NOT necessary.

Presenter: Dr Catherine C. Lewis, Distinguished Research Scientist, Mills College at Northeastern (https://lessonresearch.net/<https://lessonresearch.net/>).
Date and time: Wednesday 7 October, 5 pm UK time (British Summer Time).
Title: "Can Japanese educational approaches solve the achievement gap for historically underserved students in the West?"
Zoom info: https://zoom.us/j/6836372700?omn=92063966629<https://zoom.us/j/6836372700?omn=92063966629>
Meeting ID: 683 637 2700
This talk will focus on the recent book Teaching Powerful Problem Solving in Math: A Collaborative Approach Through Lesson Study<https://www.tcpress.com/products/teaching-powerful-problem-solving-in-math_9780807787588<https://www.tcpress.com/products/teaching-powerful-problem-solving-in-math_9780807787588>> <https://www.tcpress.com/products/teaching-powerful-problem-solving-in-math_9780807787588<https://www.tcpress.com/products/teaching-powerful-problem-solving-in-math_9780807787588>> (Teachers College Press), which "provides the first in-depth portrait of schoolwide lesson study, showing how U.S. teachers at several schools used it to implement powerful problem-based mathematics instruction".

Hope to see many there!

Peter
Peter Cave | Senior Lecturer in Japanese Studies | School of Arts, Languages, and Cultures | University of Manchester | Samuel Alexander Building | Oxford Road | Manchester M13 9PL | United Kingdom | Tel: +44 (0)161 275 3195
http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/peter.cave/<http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/peter.cave/><http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/peter.cave/>

Recent publications:

Peter Cave and Manabu Ishioka (2026), 'Tackling “Examination Hell” in Japan, 1920 to 1945: Children’s Well-being, Fair Competition, and the Needs of the State.' The Journal of Japanese Studies 52 (1), 161-194. https://online.ucpress.edu/jjs/article-abstract/52/1/161/217136/Tackling-Examination-Hell-in-Japan-1920-to?redirectedFrom=fulltext<https://online.ucpress.edu/jjs/article-abstract/52/1/161/217136/Tackling-Examination-Hell-in-Japan-1920-to?redirectedFrom=fulltext>

Yumi Dunbar and Peter Cave (2026), 'Teaching the History of the "Fifteen Years’ War" in Japanese Junior High Schools: Teachers’ Aims, Approaches, and Strategies.' Japan Forum. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09555803.2026.2616784<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09555803.2026.2616784>

Peter Cave (2026), 'History Textbooks and Political Power in Contemporary Japan: Controversial Representations, Pedagogy, and National Identity.' International Journal of Asian Studies. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-asian-studies/article/history-textbooks-and-political-power-in-contemporary-japan-controversial-representations-pedagogy-and-national-identity/B4FBDE0B9549E205298B08EC65A5354D<https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/international-journal-of-asian-studies/article/history-textbooks-and-political-power-in-contemporary-japan-controversial-representations-pedagogy-and-national-identity/B4FBDE0B9549E205298B08EC65A5354D>

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