What’s the Problem with Illustrated Mathematical Word Problems?

Abstract in English

Illustrated mathematical word problems (IMWPs) have long been a central element in mathematics education. Multiple research traditions have examined their constitution and functioning, and their effects on teaching and learning, revealing many of the challenges they pose in practice. Yet, IMWPs continue to cause difficulties—particularly for multilingual students. To engage with these recurring issues, without reducing them to a single explanation, I define a research problematique that attends to the multiple ways in which IMWPs have been studied and understood. Theory, method, and ethics are kept in continuous conversation rather than in fixed alignment. IMWPs are approached as complex and dynamic entities within mathematics education, tracing how they emerge across historical, educational, and research contexts. IMWPs are treated not as static tasks but as relational and agential participants in teaching, learning, and research—shaping how representations through text and image act within classroom practice. The thesis has two parts, each with distinct theoretical and methodological approaches. The first examines the difficulties multilingual students encounter when reading and solving IMWPs and the strategies teachers use to scaffold their proficiency. Drawing on sociocultural theories of learning and a four-fold framework of social praxis, and deploying qualitative methods—including think-aloud interviews and classroom observations in multilingual classrooms—two empirical studies explore the social, cultural, and linguistic experiences that multilingual students mobilize and create when working with IMWPs. The studies reveal how IMWPs continuously mobilize forms of exclusion. The second part shifts toward new materialist and post qualitative approaches, attending to the agency of IMWPs themselves as well as human interaction. IMWPs are treated as active participants in classrooms, shaping what can occur, what can be said and imagined. Three investigations are conducted: a literature intra-view that traces how IMWPs act, with whom they engage, and how they move across past, present, and possible futures; a speculative fabulation that reimagines IMWPs otherwise, exploring both the promises and limits of imagining and performing them differently; and a collage that follows small visual and linguistic changes to see how they reconfigure what counts as mathematical, cultural, or social difference. Together, these explorations show how IMWPs can reinforce dominant cultural narratives and implicit norms that shape who is recognized as a valued learner, while also demonstrating how alternative research methods can surface the often unseen or normalized assumptions embedded in educational materials. Across the thesis, IMWPs emerge not as neutral tasks but as relational, agential, and culturally situated artifacts that enact particular ways of knowing, participating, and becoming—especially in multilingual classrooms. By moving between sociocultural and new materialist perspectives, the work reimagines how IMWPs, and mathematics education more broadly, can be studied and thought-with. Knowledge, ethics, and didactics are inseparable—continuously moving, responsive, and entangled—and this highlights the tensions, possibilities, and responsibilities that IMWPs bring to educational research and practice.