Judy Bailey
With the release of the New Zealand Curriculum document (2007) we, as two pre-service teacher educators, formalised our ongoing conversations about the nature of mathematics. A literature review is being undertaken as part of these conversations. This reveals a wide variety of explicitly made and implicit conceptions of mathematics. Of particular interest is Barton’s description of NUC (near-universal conventional) mathematics and the suggestion that ‘mathematics could have taken many forms, the forms and preferences of NUC-mathematics were not inevitable; they are the result of a particular historical trajectory that includes many social influences, including language’ (2008, p. 24). Implications for mathematics in the NZC, and our work as pre-service teacher educators are being considered.