What Happens after Implementation? ‘Post-Implementation’ as Framing of Implementation Research in Mathematics Education

When we launched Implementation and Replication Studies in Mathematics Education (IRME) two years ago, it was in a sense a culmination of several years of work trying to increase the focus on implementation (and replications) in mathematics education research (Jankvist et al., 2021). Our feeling at the time was that improvement of mathematics teaching and learning based on various insights accumulated in research had been the omnipresent concern of mathematics education research to such a large extent that it had been overlooked as an independent research interest.

We of course recognized that attention to implementation was in no way novel. This attention has for instance been expressed by Bruckheimer’s (1979) focus on inhibitors of implementation, in Wittman’s (1995, 2021) characterization of mathematics education as a design science, in Cobb’s (2007) description of the philosophical foundations for mathematics education research, and in Artigue’s connected paradigms of design-based research and didactical engineering (e.g., Artigue, 2021). One can argue that the question of implementation is framing the mathematics education enterprise (e.g., Niss, 1999). In the introductory article of the special issue in ZDM on “Implementation and implementability of mathematics education research” (Koichu et al., 2021), we argued that even though the literature on implementation exists and can be surveyed, the literature that explores this perspective overtly is sparse. Asking mathematics educators about the quality and nature of the implementation they engage in is like asking a fish about the quality and nature of the water it swims in. The answer in both cases can very well be “what are you talking about?”.1 We — as mathematics education researchers — are immersed in a large and systemic attempt to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics, to a degree where we might overlook the influence of dedicated implementation initiatives on our research and practice. So in that sense, we have taken on the task of making implementation an overt phenomenon with clear boundaries. To stay in the ‘fish metaphor’, the water is everywhere and any attempt to distinguish it from the rest of the fish-surroundings would be flawed. This leads to a tricky situation. Of course, having overt and analytical attention towards implementation is an improvement over using naive unconscious images of what it is. Yet, because it is rather difficult to capture and describe the full ‘implementation space’, any model of implementation will lead to problems and need to be criticized.

In this editorial, we discuss the concept of ‘post-implementation’ as a way to organize the needed cautiousness and skepticism. We build on what we interpret as a current ‘post’ movement in educational research, which questions traditional categories and myths about teaching and learning in order to conceptualize the fragile and unstable constructions that education rests upon. This movement uses concepts such as post-human (Harari, 2016), post-digital (Jandric et al., 2018), and post-colonial.2 A clear and prominent example of this is the post-digital attention to the digitalization of life and education and how this occurs at an increasing speed. Still, other areas are under scrutiny as well, e.g., climate crisis, political instability, and the increased focus on the development of identity, minority status, and sexual orientation. All this is challenging our image of educating for a stable future and justifies a critique of the myths and categories that drives and maintains the standard image of teaching, learning, and formation of the youth.

Hence, in this editorial, we will discuss the increasing use of the prefix ‘post’ in educational research, and exemplify it with the current discourse around ‘post-digital education’. We then go on to define and describe what meaning we could attach to ‘post-implementation’ in mathematics education research, and discuss what this shows us about future directions for implementation (and replication) studies in mathematics education research.