Dr Heather Mendick

Heather joined Brunel University in 2011 as Reader in Education. She has previously worked at London Metropolitan University, Goldsmiths and Lancaster University. Before moving into academia she worked as a mathematics teacher for eight years. Her role at Brunel is part-time so that she has time for her friends, fiction, vegan cooking, film and television. She is delighted that one of her publications is included in Whedonology, a bibliography of academic material on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and other works by Joss Whedon. Luckily Heather’s research into popular culture enables her to watch TV and youtube and call it work. Her favourite TV shows include the much missed Sopranos, Veronica Mars, Deadwood and The Larry Sanders Show. She currently enjoys Californication, Big Brother and Justified.

See Heather on YouTube
See Heather’s page on academia.edu

Heather teaches on the BA in Contemporary Education, the PGCert in Secondary Mathematics, the EdD and PhD programmes. She supervises doctoral students working specifically in mathematics education and gender and education and more generally students in the areas of identity and social justice who are taking a post-structural approach. Her current doctoral students are:

Anna Llewellyn (Durham University): Using poststructural approaches to analyse the ‘journey’ to becoming a primary school mathematics teacher.

Asgar Rajput (Brunel University): Using a case study to examine the experiences of Muslim students in higher education.

Cathy Smith (London Metropolitan University and the Institute of Education): Using practices of the self to explore the identities of students studying with the Further Mathematics Network.

Deborah Sawyer (Goldsmiths, University of London): Using Black feminist perspectives to address the question: how do Black girls survive the transition from primary to secondary school?

Marlene Ellis (Goldsmiths, University of London): Using cultural studies to understand the experiences of Black students in further education.

Patricia Alexander (Goldsmiths, University of London): Using discourse analysis to look at how Black or Minority Ethnic Teachers understand their position as a ‘role model’?

Research Details

Heather is interested in learning in the broadest sense and particularly in the influence of popular culture, gender and social class identities and the ways that people form relationships with mathematics and science.

Her doctorate looked at the much discussed question: Why do girls choose not to study mathematics as much as boys? Her approach drew on sociology, cultural studies, feminist and queer theory and a version of it was published as Masculinities in Mathematics by Open University Press in 2006. She has also co-edited, with Laura Black and Yvette Solomon, a book on Mathematical Relationships in Education: identities and participation published by Routledge in 2009. Her most recent book, Urban Youth and Schooling, was written jointly with Louise Archer and Sumi Hollingworth and published by Open University Press in 2010. It focuses on the identities, aspirations and experiences of young Londoners who were classified by their schools as ‘at risk’ of dropping out of education. Although written before the urban disturbances in the UK during the summer of 2011 it makes points pertinent to understanding these.

Recently Heather’s work has focused on the ways that popular culture, in all its many forms, influences people’s identities. This has included two projects looking at how mathematics and mathematicians are represented in cultural texts and the ways that learners make sense of these representations. She also carried out a project with Katya Williams that explored, among other things, whether CSI really was responsible for increased enrolments in forensic science degrees. Her last research project, with Marie-Pierre Moreau has looked at online representations of women and men in science, engineering and technology. She has written about celebrity culture with Kim Allen and Rosalyn George.

Heather is a member of the editorial board of the the journals Research in Mathematics Education and the International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology and, as an executive member of the Gender and Education Association, she relaunched their website and is currently editing the site's resources pages.

Externally funded research

Heather has worked on a number of externally funded research projects on a range of policy and social justice issues (for the Gatsby Technical Education Projects, the Scottish Executive, the Esmeé Fairbairn Foundation and what were then called the DfES, the TTA and the LSDA but whose initials have shifted since). She has led the following research studies:

The representation of women in Science, Engineering and Technology in online media (with Marie-Pierre Moreau, funded by the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science Engineering and Technology)

The impact of the depiction of work in TV drama on young people's career aspirations & choices (with Katya Williams, funded by the British Academy)

Mathematical Relationships: Identities & Participation (with Laura Black, Margaret Brown, Melissa Rodd and Yvette Solomon, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council)

Mathematical Images and Identities: Education, Entertainment, Social Justice (with Debbie Epstein and Marie-Pierre Moreau, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council)

Mathematical Images and Gender Identities (with Sumi Hollingworth and Marie-Pierre Moreau, funded by the UK Resource Centre for Women in Science Engineering and Technology)

Research Group

Publications

Journal Papers

(2013) Allen, K. and Mendick, H., Young people’s uses of celebrity: class, gender and ‘improper’ celebrity, Discourse (Abingdon): studies in the cultural politics of education

(2012) Mendick, H. and Francis, B., Boffin and geek identities: abject or privileged?, Gender and Education

(2010) Moreau, M., Mendick, H. and Epstein, D., Constructions of mathematicians in popular culture and learners’ narratives: a study or mathematical and non-mathematical subjectivities, Cambridge Journal of Education 40 (1) : 25- 38

(2010) Epstein, D., Mendick, H. and Moreau, M., Imagining the mathematician: young people talking about popular representations of maths, Discourse (Abingdon): studies in the cultural politics of education 31 (1) : 45- 60

(2009) Smart, S., Hutchings, M., Maylor, U., Mendick, H. and Menter, I., Processes of middle-class reproduction in a graduate employment scheme, Journal of Education and Work 22 (1) : 35- 53

(2008) Mendick, H., Subtracting difference: troubling transitions from GCSE to AS-level mathematics, British Educational Research Journal 34 (6) : 711- 732

(2005) Mendick, H., Mathematical stories: why do more boys than girls choose to study mathematics at AS-level in England?, British Journal of Sociology of Education 26 (2) : 225- 241 Download publication

(2005) Mendick, H., A beautiful myth? The gendering of being /doing 'good at maths', Gender and Education 17 (2) : 89- 105

Conference Papers

(2005) Mendick, H., Subtracting difference: troubling transitions into AS-level mathematics, Social Diversity and Difference: pre-entry

Book Chapters

(2010) Llewellyn, A. and Mendick, H., Does every child count? Quality, equity and mathematics with/in neoliberalism. In: Atweh, B., Graven, M., Secada, W. and Valero, P. eds. Mapping equity and quality in mathematics education. Dordrecht : Springer

(2007) Bibby, T., Drake, P., Mendick, H. and Povey, H., Mathematics and numeracy. In: Myers, K., Taylor, H., Adler, S. and Leonard, D. eds. Genderwatch: Still Watching. Stoke-on-Trent : Trentham

Books

(2010) Archer, L., Hollingworth, S. and Mendick, H., Urban youth and schooling. Open University Press

(2009) Black, Laura., Mendick, Heather. and Solomon, Y., Mathematical relationships in education. Taylor & Francis

(2006) Mendick, H., Masculinities in mathematics. Open University Press (McGraw-Hill Education)