Stewarding Our Commons for the Infinite Game of Research

The Tragedy of the Commons

Some of the most important problems of our time—to name one, the precarious sustainability of the relationship between human life and our planet—are cases of a problem that has been known to economists and philosophers for centuries: the so-called tragedy of the commons. Aristotle put it this way:

For that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it. Every one thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is himself concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to fulfill. (ca. 350 B.C.E./1999, Book III)

The modern sense of the tragedy of the commons makes use of the economic concept of an externality, which occurs when activities of an actor (e.g., the operations of a factory) produce an impact on common resources (e.g., neighborhoods, water streams). Externalities are sometimes positive (e.g., a factory’s workers might patronize local businesses, promoting economic growth in the factory’s neighborhood). But externalities can also be negative (e.g., the factory’s disposal of contaminating materials can make waterways dangerous for drinking or swimming). If those negative externalities are not mitigated in some way (e.g., by the community’s organizing efforts to reduce contamination), a tragedy of the commons scenario might ensue—the loss of waterways usage.² The concept of the tragedy of the commons is not foreign to education: Indeed, Grinell and Rabin (2013) have argued that a tragedy of the commons scenario is possible in a public education system, like the one in the United States, that makes unrestricted demands on students’ instructional time for high-stakes test preparation.

Here, I wish to consider the commons that sustain the practice of scholarly research, and how we can avoid a tragedy of the commons scenario in them. The institutions that support our research practice (e.g., journals, conferences, associations, awards, funding programs) are our commons; they are available for individual researchers to enable, distribute, and promote their work and thereby benefit individually. These actions have important positive externalities, such as the advancement of mathematics education knowledge and the eventual empowering of society to improve the practices of mathematics education. These are important reasons why those institutions exist. To ensure such collective benefit, publications and presentations are often scrutinized for quality through peer review and subject to norms of scholarly communication (e.g., genre expectations, style guidelines).

These coupled actions of submission and review are part of what Rauch (2021) called liberal science, which aspires to put a premium on viewpoint diversity:

Without pluralism and viewpoint diversity, transcending our biases is impossible. . . . Perfect objectivity will always elude us, but we come much closer if we follow the empirical rule by checking our views against others’ different views, which of course is possible only where people disagree. (p. 193)

The progress of knowledge, though never linear, relies on a process of public knowledge production that is depersonalized,³ decentralized, and rule-based; it seeks the methodical pursuit of truth. Clearly, the progress of public knowledge has been and will continue to be imperfect, but this is not a reason to discard the aspirational values of liberal science. In this tradition of inquiry, as Rauch (2021, pp. 88–89) put it, no knowledge claim is final, it merely withstands temporarily the efforts to debunk it (fallibilist rule), and all knowledge claims need to be methodologically reproducible as opposed to based on the authority of a person, group, or institution (empirical rule). Every field of knowledge grows dialectically and by the accumulation of individual contributions over time.

This brings me to the possible negative externalities that the self-interested practices of individual researchers might involuntarily contribute to our research commons. Academics trade in novelty and complexity: Each new contribution stands a chance of contradicting what others think and know, perhaps even rubbing some people the wrong way. As receivers of those contributions, we all should expect the discomfort associated with work that complicates as well as contradicts our views—not only our theories and methods, but also what we think to be true or good. If, as members of our intellectual community, we were not capable of receiving divergent contributions, divergent thinkers might go elsewhere. If this happened, the institutions that form the commons for our research practice could become insular communities, closed around orthodoxy and without the energy needed to grow. Because examples exist right and left of how academics have been unwelcoming of research that questions existing knowledge (e.g., see Dreger, 2015), the mitigation of this negative externality requires more than the questioning of some orthodoxies. The loss of ideological diversity, of heterodoxy, in our research institutions is a potential negative externality that we must prepare to mitigate by building into our commons assurances for pluralism and viewpoint diversity. We all can prevent a tragedy of the commons in our research field by stewarding intellectual pluralism.

Stewarding Pluralism in JRME: Authors, Editors, and Reviewers

In several of our editorials (e.g., Herbst et al., 2022c), we have used the word “stewardship" to describe a virtue often exercised by reviewers and editors of the journal. The Wikipedia⁴ page on stewardship notes that though its etymology connects it to the role of servants as custodians and caretakers of the domestic properties of their masters, the current meaning of the term is “the acceptance or assignment of responsibility to shepherd and safeguard the valuables of others" (“Stewardship," 2023, para. 4). I first describe briefly how JRME’s operations allow us to steward pluralism.

As an institution that is part of the commons of our research practice, JRME provides important resources for mathematics education researchers to advance their scholarly interests and professional careers. Those who submit to the journal seek to propose new ideas, to contribute new knowledge, and hence also to surprise us, contradicting received wisdom. Argument and counterpoint are the coin of the realm, and these are made against the background of prior work. As editor, I love authors who volunteer to do that: They are willing to challenge our field intellectually while also submitting their work to the disciplined exercise of peer review and editing. That takes not only courage, but also humility. Authors who submit to JRME do not expect an easier path through our review process on the basis of their personal name and trajectory, their demographic group identity, the topic they study, their research paradigm, or the ideology behind their work. Instead, they know that what they write will be held to high scholarly standards, and, if their contribution succeeds through the review process, that it will evolve through the editorial work. Although authors will be asked to align with the genre of scholarly publishing and refrain from editorializing, preaching, commanding, or condemning, the views behind their research will be visible in publication as a contribution to the pluralism of our field. The same will happen to other authors whose work may display alternative views.

As editor, I constantly need to exercise good judgment to avoid letting my own personal biases toward or against particular research topics, theories, or methodologies lead me to solicit reviews from predictably congenial or critical panels of reviewers. I am thankful to be able to work with my associate editors to select reviewers. Together, we strive to put certain biases in dialogue with other biases, making our reviewer panels diverse, especially with respect to viewpoints. Putting together a final decision on the basis of heterogeneous recommendations is hard work, but it ensures that we know a manuscript has been pluralistically vetted. In addition, making final decisions together with my associate editors helps ensure that our personal preferences do not limit the journal to broadcasting only a limited range of positions and, instead, that we continue to publish manuscripts that attest to our field’s intellectual pluralism.

Herbst et al. (2022b) elaborated how the work of panels of reviewers with diverse background and expertise supports not only evaluation, but also education of authors, editors, and other reviewers, and the welcoming of new contributors to our field. The reviewers’ own exercise of stewardship could also involve protecting pluralism while being stringent in their scholarly demands. Reviewers who wish editors and authors to heed their recommendations should provide clear comments with evidence that supports their overall recommendation. This of course includes reasoned arguments that question the claims, theory, or methods of manuscripts. However, because review panels often reflect diversity of expertise, reviewers should also offer reasoned comments on what they see as strengths in a manuscript. This helps authors receive both positive and negative comments in ways that they can act on. It also helps my associate editors and me weigh positive opinions against negative comments. Likewise, reviewers should also ensure that their stances against or toward accepting particular pieces of research are based on scholarship quality, rather than on viewpoint agreement or disagreement.

I am happy to be able to report that our experience thus far has largely been one in which reviewers and authors contribute to maintain the quality of the journal as a commons for our research field. However, present tendencies in public discourse and intellectual life at large have raised our awareness of the importance of being proactive in stewarding pluralism in all the commons of our research field.

Stewarding Pluralism in Our Research Field: Why Is It Needed?

My call for us, mathematics education scholars, to consider how we steward pluralism in the institutions that serve as commons for our research derives from current diagnoses of the state of public discourse and civic life in general and of universities in particular (Daniels, 2021; Furedi, 2016; Lukianoff & Haidt, 2018; Rauch, 2021). Because recent tendencies in social life in general are toward fragmentation and the creation of echo chambers, now more than ever we need to make an effort to be in scholarly community with people who look at mathematics education phenomena from perspectives different than our own, even if what they occasionally say or write might be seen as problematic by some individuals or groups.

For quite a few years, our institutions have been taking deliberate steps toward diversity, equity, and inclusion. A notable collective benefit stands as justification for these steps: the belief that exposure to difference helps us all check our biases, learn how others experience the world, and grow intellectually (Gurin et al., 2002). As in any learning experience, pluralism requires accepting discomfort. And as in any learning experience, we need to stick around in spite of the discomfort to reap the benefits of learning. This does not mean inviting offensive expressions to our private life, but it does mean expecting that our scholarly community will not always be as congenial as our personal circles of friends can be. If congeniality and comfort prevailed over viewpoint diversity, our institutions might not be as effective in promoting either the growth of the knowledge we cultivate or the growth of our individual capacities to participate in producing knowledge. At the very least, engaging with arguments we find seriously off-putting helps us refine the core of our counterarguments and make them more powerful.

Our scholarly community needs to preserve its capacity to challenge each of us in some way for all of us to grow—both in the way we look at phenomena and in the range of phenomena on which we focus (Herbst et al., 2022a). Our pluralistic gaze has become inclusive not only of cognitive and epistemological perspectives, but also sociopolitical and critical ones; our pluralism in the foci of our research has enabled our field to include studies of individual mathematical thinking, classrooms, systems, workplaces, and cultures. No matter how far we think we have come, our field will continue to grow by making our collective gaze more sophisticated and our collective focus wider, not by enforcing one or another orthodoxy. The discourse in our scholarly community needs to do more than resonate with dominant or popular voices to keep growing. It needs to question, to offer challenge and dissonance, to make us individually uncomfortable, to inspire us to search outside of ourselves—in data, in new methods, and in diverse literature—for perspectives that help us understand what we do not yet understand. In doing this, any new contribution will come across as calling out other work as false, simpler, shortsighted, biased, uninteresting, disingenuous, and more. This is part of the pluralism of the field: Everything we state connotes an evaluation, but an evaluation is neither necessarily dehumanizing nor the final word on the subject. The antiauthoritarianism to which liberal science aspires means that we do agree that we can disagree, but that because we engage in the methodical pursuit of truth, data and argument can overcome disagreement without anybody having to take it personally. This seems so banal that it should go without saying, but, unfortunately, the fragmentation of society and its echo chambers is not the only reason why I think that it needs to be said. In addition to this general trend, universities, arguably centers for the production and dissemination of knowledge, have not been successful at stewarding pluralism.

In his recent characterization of what universities owe democracy, Ronald Daniels (the president of Johns Hopkins University) included “cultivating the meaningful exchange of ideas across difference (pluralism)" as one of their four key functions, along with creating and disseminating knowledge, civic education, and promoting social mobility (2021, p. 22). Alas, in the last few years, universities have instead faltered, occasionally insulating students from the benefits of ideological pluralism but more often taking a passive stance toward the promotion of pluralism and by default endorsing the opposite, letting students stay in their comfort zones. Furedi’s (2016) sociological analysis of university cultures on both sides of the Atlantic further showed how a discourse that infantilizes youth and medicalizes youth experiences has pushed university citizens to look at intellectual life as if it necessarily requires a tradeoff between freedom and security. And Lukianoff and Haidt (2018) wrote that universities have been failing to prepare the child for the road (as the proverb says) through both the idea that speech can be as harmful as physical violence and the expectation that university classes will be safe spaces where discomfort will be preempted.

Because the vast majority of contributors to research in mathematics education are employed by or otherwise affiliated with universities, we are likely to have been affected by the university cultures that surround us. Moreover, insofar as we are educators of (predominantly) young people, we cannot but recognize the importance of caring for our students’ emotional well-being, even if that care would not justify our shielding them from reading material or interpersonal interactions in which their knowledge and beliefs would be challenged: Trauma is real, and university students might also have it. Those of us who teach at universities are obligated to care for students’ feelings and lived experiences, even if we are also obligated to help them grow intellectually and personally.

However, the relationships we entertain with others in a scholarly community are different than those we have with the students under our care at the university. Among researchers (including our graduate students, who become our colleagues as soon as they choose to be in scholarly community with us), we are bound by the common goal of advancing knowledge to understand the world and to empower society. The notion that the institutions that are the commons of our research should inherit the same infantilization affecting universities—promoting trigger warnings and safe spaces, restricting and managing freedom of expression on account of its potential harms—needs to be rejected. Stewardship of our commons can and should imply resisting those tendencies just as much as resisting any individual’s entitlement to use scholarly spaces for unconstrained promotion of ideologies.

Our field has done a reasonably good job avoiding being divided by the choice of methodology—our journals and conferences accept contributions that are quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods. We can proudly offer our field as an example of methodological pluralism, even if we still can grow in the range of techniques we use and the rigor with which we use them. The field has also done fairly well in how we appreciate both basic and applied research. Our theoretical pluralism is also worth noting: The field seems to value research that imports theories from elsewhere (including critical ones) and research that develops theory within mathematics education. We were not always so pluralistic in those ways; we have come a long way and should be proud of that.

As a subfield of social research, we can naturally expect that our scholarship, including the theories we deal with and the type of research we read, will touch on issues that are ethical, political, even spiritual, and that personal orientations to those issues may be visible through what we say or how we say it. We need to be at peace with the idea that, within the context of scholarly communication, viewpoints that can be associated with any and many old and new ideologies have the right to be expressed. Our field has come a long way toward becoming more inclusive and diverse. We cannot afford to let one or a small set of ideologies undo that progress, even if those ideologies present themselves as more just or more morally clear, or if we personally feel them to be so. As members of a small field, mathematics education scholars cannot afford for journals, conferences, awards, and more to become ideologically aligned, because this is likely to threaten the long-term existence of those entities. That is when the tragedy of the commons would occur. But can we do anything to stop this?

Stewarding Pluralism in Our Field: What Can Be Done?

Daniels (2021) noted that one mistake of universities has been to assume the role of arbiters in the question of freedom versus security, when what universities do best is to educate. He proposed that universities deliberately teach pluralism, and cited examples of professors from different ideological orientations who have been co-teaching undergraduates. Practical things could be done in our field to steward pluralism as well.

Four things occur to me that could be done in our major conferences.⁵ First, the calls for proposals could identify specific conference themes while also explicitly inviting diverse perspectives on such themes and making explicit mention of the value of proposals that are unrelated to the theme (after all, liberal science is decentralized; associations and funders may encourage research agendas but should not determine them). Second, plenary speakers could represent not only demographic but also ideological diversity, and in all cases time could be allotted for shorter, prepared reactions to plenaries coming from alternative perspectives. When I gave a plenary at PME-NA in 2010 (Columbus, Ohio), each of the plenary speakers had a respondent appointed by the organizers; I am told that such practice is common in MES already. Third, conference organizers and the organizations behind them could solicit more input from stakeholders, meaning all of us, regarding how well their institutions and events are encouraging pluralism and containing the plurality of voices in our research field.

Fourth and finally, we could openly embrace themes that call for multiple perspectives and figure out ways to let the perspectives be heard without creating opportunities to judge the speakers as a way to educate ourselves as a community. Such exercises not only educate us on the multiplicity of perspectives, but also help us build the emotional capacity to listen for understanding and, if we disagree, to do so reasonably, assuming good intentions rather than the intention to offend. For example, at the upcoming 2023 PME conference in Haifa, I expect to participate in an Oxford-style debate (that is, with set speakers to represent positions both for and against a resolution) among editors of four journals. The debate concerns the proposal that articles published in mathematics education journals should be required to state how they contribute to sustainability. What felt like a contrived exercise when I received the invitation seems now, in light of the topic of this editorial, a neat example of how a research community could handle ideologically charged issues. Regardless of what we may think about the proposal itself, the notion that if such a proposal is in the air it should be publicly debated, and that the debate should explicitly attempt to represent the different perspectives, seems laudable to me.

Conclusion

To conclude, I want to return to Carse’s (1986) concepts of finite and infinite games. Finite games are like a ­tournament—such as the Qatar World Cup—that players play to win because the game ends (and sometimes the best team wins, like my Argentinian team in Qatar!). Infinite games, in contrast, are like a sport—such as the game of soccer itself—that players play to keep alive and open to be played. Bringing the analogy to our context, a conference proposal or a manuscript submission can be seen as playing a finite game that ends with acceptance or rejection. More broadly, any argument can be a finite game in the sense that it pursues specific objectives and makes a specific point. But this conference proposal, manuscript submission, or argument also contributes to the larger, infinite game of the research enterprise. By patronizing a journal or a conference with our submissions, reviews, readership, and attendance, or by making a point to add to our collective knowledge, we are contributing to keeping them indefinitely alive and open for others. Research therefore sustains an idea of progress that may not always be achieved (e.g., the production of knowledge within certain boundaries sometimes fails to make inroads and may even create regressions) but that is always foregrounded as the motive (i.e., to advance knowledge and empower society). This motive is as enduring as the game of soccer—we will never be done producing knowledge, and we need to preserve the capacity, the energy, and the institutions to continue doing it.

This journal, other journals, conferences, awards, doctoral programs, centers, funding streams, and the like all have the right to specialize in some things, but they do best when they take steps toward specialization in a measured, deliberate way and remain inclusive by welcoming diversity and pluralism in all other aspects. Each of those institutions plays an infinite game: They do not have a singular task to accomplish and be done with; their mission is to be the commons of research, to support the advancement of knowledge and empowerment of society. As individuals, we may favor particular aspects of these institutions. But stewardship calls on us to continue to mind the whole—these institutions are the commons of our research field and thus need to be open for all, not appropriated by any one group, methodology, theory, or ideology. Having different journals and conferences, just like different leagues in sports, supports both the possibility that many finite games are played at any one time and that they all contribute to sustaining the infinite game of research. Thus, whereas the finite games in research (e.g., getting a paper accepted in JRME) can be seen as wins or losses, everybody wins in the infinite game as long as we all continue to play. However, we can contribute only if we are open to being challenged and slow at taking offense. Let’s keep the games open by stewarding pluralism in our research institutions.