Education as Re-Embedding: Stroud Communiversity, Walking the Land and the Enduring Spell of the Sensuous

How we know, is at least as important as what we know: Before educationalists can begin to teach sustainability, we need to explore our own views of the world and how these are formed. The paper explores the ontological assumptions that underpin, usually implicitly, the pedagogical relationship and opens up the question of how people know each other and the world they share. Using understandings based in a phenomenological approach and guided by social constructionism, it suggests that the most appropriate pedagogical method for teaching sustainability is one based on situated learning and reflexive practice. To support its ontological questioning, the paper highlights two alternative culture’s ways of understanding and recording the world: Those of the Inca who inhabited pre-Columbian Peru, which was based on the quipu system of knotted strings, and the complex social and religious system of the songlines of the original people of Australia. As an indication of the sorts of teaching experiences that an emancipatory and relational pedagogy might give rise to, the paper offers examples of two community learning experiences in the exemplar sustainable community of Stroud, Gloucestershire in the United Kingdom where the authors live

Khipu UR19: Inca Measurements of the Moon’s Diameter and its Distance from the Earth

This study explores the functions of tukapu as possibly important elements that are directly involved in the khipu construction process, i.e., when used by khipukamayuqs as a useful rudimentary outline for organising ideas, points, and details when constructing their forthcoming khipu. My re-study of the khipu sample UR19, which was previously investigated by Urton (2003) for other purposes, involved using the additional pieces of information that were identified in the graphical representations of the organisation of three different knot types that were tied into pendant and subsidiary strings. Proceeding one step further, we can sketch out a structure for the various meanings that are contained in these devices, which takes us much closer to developing an approach that could help us attempt to decipher the khipu. The irrational number π (first used by Archimedes and Liu Hui in the third century B.C.), the diameter of the Moon, and its distance from Earth (first measured by Aristarchus in the third century B.C.) could account for the observed results

Epistolary Silence in Françoise de Graffigny's Lettres d'une Péruvienne (1747)

Reading Françoise de Graffigny's 1747 novel Lettres d'une Péruvienne as an atypical travel narrative, I argue that the author's use of epistolary silence, a lack of response to a letter or a hiatus between letters, constitutes an integral part of her feminist message, a message we can recuperate by interpreting that silence.En lisant le roman de Françoise de Graffigny Lettres d'une Péruvienne, comme une narration atypique de voyage, je déclare que l'usage du silence épistolaire de l'auteure, un manque de réponse à la lettre ou la lacune entre les lettres constitue une partie intégrale de son message féministe, un message que nous récupérons en interprétant ce silence

Recuperar la memoria histórica y las matemáticas andinas

En este trabajo los autores buscan rescatar la memoria histórica de unas matemáticas olvidadas: las que estructuraron el terreno andino antes de la llegada de los conquistadores españoles en el siglo XVI. Las tradiciones numéricas de las culturas autóctonas andinas han sido negadas, borradas, y apropiadas por discursos coloniales y extranjeros que han interpretado el pasado andino de acuerdo a sus propios términos negando la existencia de otras formas de conocimiento incluyendo las de sus propios creadores. Trazar estos procesos históricos globales permite recuperar la memoria histórica andina, la cual se podría incorporar a clases de etnomatemáticas en un futuro. Lograr difundir la historia intelectual y matemática del pasado andino tiene la potencia de re-ubicar el pensamiento indígena dentro de las estructuras unilaterales de poder, así cambiando la forma en que la agencia indígena se reconoce y promoviendo la pluralidad enriquecedora de nuestra sociedad

Aztec, Inca, and Maya [5th grade]

Students will understand that… -geographical factors influence civilizations through environment, economy, growth, and communication. - -civilizations have a rise and fall -understand civilization as a system