The Power of Individual Subjectivity and the Subjectivity of Power in Education

Also CSST Working Paper #30.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51164/1/396.pd

Dignity, recognition, and reconciliation: forgiveness, ethnomathematics, and mathematics education

Ethnomathematics owes both its power and its limitations to its origins in the Western conceptual axioms of culture and mathematics. We explore potentially contradictory impulses inherent to ethnomathematics that prevent richer applications to mathematics education, as well as some ways through which these contradictions sometimes preserveforms of indignity and injustice. We then propose alternative foundations for the program of ethnomathematics grounded in post-colonial notions of dignity, recognition and reconciliation, connecting these ideas to forgiveness as both critical awareness of dispossession, and as refusal to allow dispossession and indignity to influence the present and future

The Housing Crisis Enters the 1990s

Homelessness in the United States is a symptom of a much deeper economic and housing crisis — a widening gap between incomes and housing prices. With the end of the Cold War, the nation has the resources to solve these problems, but to do so it must mobilize the political will. This article examines the roots of crisis, the public policies and market forces that created it, and policy recommendations to solve the problem. Key to forging a solution is building the political coalition needed to create a broad public consensus

Refusal as a Democratic Catalyst for Mathematics Education Development

Discussions about the connections between mathematics and democracy amongst the general populace have not been explicitly well rehearsed. A critical relationship with democracy for mathematics education may involve directing and redirecting its purposes. But, we ask, what if the ‘choice’ to not participate in experiences of mathematics education, or in its (re)direction, were itself also a critical relationship with mathematics education? What if this refusal and disobedience to the evocative power of mathematics were a democratic action? We argue that consideration of mathematics education for democracy and development must take seriously specific acts of refusal that directly confront the construction of inequality common in most development contexts. Globalisation and development discourses, via citizenship and nationalism, construct relationships with learners and mathematics education in very specific ways that delimit possibilities for egalitarianism and democratic action. But, might such action not be recognised, not as refusal to participate per se, but as a refusal to participate in mathematics education’s colonising and/or globalising neo-liberal gaze? In arguing for the opening of a position of radical equality, we introduce Jacques Rancière to mathematics education theory, noting that for Rancière emancipation is the intentional disregard for ideological narratives such as the ones produced by mathematics education discourses. Thus, we provoke serious reconsideration of the assumptions behind most school improvement and professional development projects, as well as mathematics education policies and practices framed by globalising development discourses, and in the process we challenge our colleagues to consider ‘refusal’ not as deficit or failure, but as a critical position of radical equality in relation to mathematics education

Ethnomathematical research and drama in education techniques: developing a dialogue in a geometry class of 10th grade students

Ethnomathematical research, together with digital technologies (WebQuest) and Drama-in- Education (DiE) techniques, can create a fruitful learning environment in a mathematics classroom—a hybrid/third space—enabling increased student participation and higher levels of cognitive engagement. This article examines how ethnomathematical ideas processed within the experiential environment established by the Drama-in-Education techniques challenged students‘ conceptions of the nature of mathematics, the ways in which students engaged with mathematics learning using mind and body, and the ̳dialogue‘ that was developed between the Discourse situated in a particular practice and the classroom Discourse of mathematics teaching. The analysis focuses on an interdisciplinary project based on an ethnomathematical study of a designing tradition carried out by the researchers themselves, involving a search for informal mathematics and the connections with context and culture; 10th grade students in a public school in Athens were introduced to the mathematics content via an original WebQuest based on this previous ethnomathematical study; Geometry content was further introduced and mediated using the Drama-in-Education (DiE) techniques. Students contributed in an unfolding dialogue between formal and informal knowledge, renegotiating both mathematical concepts and their perception of mathematics as a discipline

Mathematics Education as Dystopia: A Future Beyond

We argue that scholars and practitioners of mathematics education need to find new directions through recognition of its dystopic characteristics, and embrace these characteristics as both the source of challenges and method of response. This contrasts with the generally utopic approach of most scholarship in the field. We offer critical ethnomathematics education as a model, since it has its own origins in lingering dystopic legacies. A perpetual hopelessness and disempowerment is one implicit curriculum of contemporary mathematics education, where the mathematics one learns might help to describe things, yet hardly assists in transforming the reification of power and agency in society. Embracing dystopia rather than trying to circumvent it generates new questions and pathways

Sobre Incerteza, Dúvida, Responsabilidade e Viagens: um ensaio sobre dois livros de Ole Skovsmose

A natureza crítica da educação matemática representa elevada incerteza. Naturalmente, é possível tentar ignorar esta incerteza. Isto, por exemplo, pode ser feito assumindo que a educação matemática, de alguma forma, pode tornarse “determinada” a servir algumas funções sociais atrativas quando organizadas em, digamos, um currículo nacional coroado por alguns objetivos bem escolhidos. Mas acho que isso seja uma ilusão. A função da educação matemática não pode ser determinada (ou re-determinada) pela mera introdução de alguns princípios orientadores explicitados no topo do currículo. Mudar o “indeterminismo” da educação matemática não é tarefa fácil. Não existem procedimentos diretos para a “determinação”. As funções da educação matemática dependem dos múltiplos e particulares contextos nos quais o currículo é chamado a agir. Reconhecer a natureza crítica da educação matemática, incluindo nisso todas as incertezas relativas a ela, é uma característica da educação matemática crítica. (SKOVSMOSE, 2005, p.44). ..

Tales from camp Wilde: queer(y)ing environmental education research

This paper questions the relative silence of queer theory and theorizing inenvironmental education research. We explore some possibilities for queering environmental education research by fabricating (and inviting colleagues to fabricate) stories of Camp Wilde, a fictional location that helps us to expose the facticity of the field&rsquo;s heteronormative constructedness. These stories suggest alternative ways of (re)presenting and (re)producing both the subjects/objects of our inquiries and our identities as researchers. The contributors draw on a variety of theoretical resources from art history, deconstruction, ecofeminism, literary criticism, popular cultural studies, and feminist poststructuralism to perform an orientation to environmental education research that we hope will never be arrested by its categorization as a &ldquo;new genre.&rdquo;<br /