Living Landscapes and Topographies

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

Abstract

Purpose:
In 2018, Thom and Glandfield reconceptualized the mathematics classroom as an ever-changing landscape. We observed mathematical ideas and the dynamics of them as a living topography. Taking these metaphors-- living, landscape and topography, we apply them more broadly to explore their figurative and conceptual potential for reimagining STEM and M in STEM.

Theoretical Frameworks, Methods and Sources: Framed within our ecological (Bowers, 2011) and indigenous sensibilities (Basso, 1996), we examine the architecture of the Incas, as an illustrative example, to observe the historical and conceptually co-emergent ways that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics existed as peoples of this early civilization lived with their land.

Conclusions:
We observe Incan architecture as arising from the complex ways that cultural knowing (including mathematics, science, engineering, and technology) and interactions with the world shape the environment and vice versa (Katz, 2001; Walter, 1988). As such, Incan architecture can be imagined as a topography or “writing of place” (Topography, 2018, International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences). Our reading of this topography recursively enables the architecture to be both a visible and inseparable feature of the landscape as well as “distinctive features of a sphere of activity” (Landscape, 2017, Oxford English Dictionary). This reading, simply put, means Incan knowing specific to place (Basso, 1996). STEM then as part of such knowing is the co-emergence of Inca living with the land (Ghostkeeper, 2007; Varela, 1997); in the same ways that languages emerged from humans living with the land (Basso, 1996; Ghostkeeper, 2017).

Scholarly Significance:
Like many industrialized countries, The Government of Canada asserts that “as more and more businesses and organizations seek to innovate and to modernize and grow their businesses, the demand for people who can fill STEM-related jobs will only continue to increase” (Government of Canada, 2018a, para. 1). The Government also asks researchers, “What knowledge, skills and delivery methods are required in order for the public education system to create an innovative, resilient and culturally rich society?” (Government of Canada, 2018b, para. 2). If mathematics at its core, like all other knowledge, is a cultural phenomenon that co-emerges and co-evolves with the world, we must assume that an innovative, resilient and culturally rich society requires education that engages such mathematics as vital to STEM. STEM then is neither new nor attributable to only western industrialized countries, but inherently, a fundamental part of all cultures, of being human, and of living in diverse ways with the land (Basso, 1996; Ghostkeeper, 2007).

Authors

• Florence A. Glanfield, University of Alberta

• Jennifer Susan Thom, University of Victoria

• Dawn Wiseman, Bishop's University