How secondary mathematics teachers describe and teach ‘ability’ groups: discursive and non-discursive practices

This article examines how teachers with ‘ability’ grouped (set/streamed/tracked) classes describe their students’ learning and behaviour, and how they teach such classes. We draw on teacher and student interviews and classroom observations from a study of about 450 Year Nine students (age 13–14) and their 16 mathematics teachers in three secondary schools in Aotearoa New Zealand. Teachers often described top-stream students as self-motivated, confident, mature learners, in contrast to low-stream students, who teachers portrayed as needing clear, specific instructions and firm behavioural boundaries. Drawing on Foucault, we trace the ways in which teachers’ discursive and non-discursive practices enable and constrain students’ subjectivities and learning trajectories. We argue that grouping practices interact with wider racialised and classed discourses about mathematics and mathematical ability in ways that reinforce existing inequities.