Situated Perspectives on Creating Mathematics Tasks for Peace and Sustainability

• In Event: 64.034 - Reimagining the M in STEM: Mathematical Actions for Innovative, Resilient, and Culturally Rich Communities

Abstract

Purpose: In 2015, leaders from around the world agreed upon seventeen goals, called the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (United Nations, 2015). These goals focus attention on common needs across nations, societies, and cultures for practices that ensure viable environmental and social structures with consideration of people’s needs for economic viability.

In mathematics education, scholarship has addressed such concerns under various rubrics, notably critical mathematics education (e.g., Bartell, 2013, Gutstein, 2012, Wager & Stinson, 2012). Our objective in this paper is to build from recent cross-cultural work spearheaded by the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development. This Institute supports the development of discipline specific teaching resources for making peace and sustainability the heart of teaching (e.g., UNESCO, 2017). Our paper examines the question: What are the challenges and opportunities for creating mathematics tasks for peace and sustainability?

Perspectives: Two concepts in this work are particularly relevant to our contribution to this symposium. First, interdisciplinarity is a necessary result of foregrounding context in mathematical activity. This symposium focuses on the M in STEM—mathematics viewed from an interdisciplinary perspective. Second, real issues in local contexts make mathematical learning meaningful. We argue that in addition to making tasks address local contexts, the process of creating such tasks needs to be attentive to local cultures.

Modes of Inquiry: We bring our range of experiences teaching and working with mathematics teachers in Canada, Ghana, India, and Swaziland to discuss a range of challenges and opportunities for creating mathematics tasks for peace and sustainability. Each of these contexts has a history of British colonialism that plays out differently in each location, perhaps related to current relative wealth and poverty. Related to this, we examine our dialogue around constructing an exemplar task addressing unequal distribution of resources (poverty and wealth).

Results and Significance: Ironically, the most noticeable cultural distinctive that confronts us in developing resources for environmentally and socially responsive mathematics is the dominance of technoscientificity (Knijnik, García, Ideland & Valero, 2015) and abstraction that has colonized mathematics education. While we try to be responsive to local educators’ concerns, they are reluctant to escape this colonizing force that distracts from prospective focus on local concerns.

In reimagining the M in STEM related fields we underscore the need for understanding the socio-political, economic and environmental issues in a context of engagement. An important factor related to this is the amount of time teachers have available to invest in the venture of resource/task development. Teachers with fulltime jobs and family obligations especially in relatively poor regions are often not compensated for doing extra work on resource development.
A significant aspect of our work in points to how teacher training does not position teachers with agency for identifying mathematics in local cultural practices (this issue draws attention to the relevance of ethnomathematics to task development). In contexts where poverty is a dominant force, it is hard to dedicate and justify attention to local contexts.

Authors

• David Wagner, University of New Brunswick

• Emmanuel Amoah, The University of British Columbia

• Kwesi Yaro, The University of British Columbia