Challenging Eurocentrism in Mathematics Education: A Vision for Indigenous Ways of Knowing in Mathematics

• In Event: 63.023 - Mathematics and Settler Colonialism: Toward a Future That Centers Indigenous Worldviews

Abstract

Objectives: Drawing from a participatory design project titled Indigenous STEAM camp (ISTEAM), we forward a vision for conceptualizing Indigenous ways of knowing in mathematics education. In this session we challenge Eurocentrism in mathematics education and make explicit the ways in which Indigenous communities continue to do mathematics in community contexts.

We have engaged in an Artscience participatory design project (Author, 2016) titled ISTEAM. The project was developed to engage Indigenous youth in understanding the changing lands and waters in the Pacific Northwest through direct engagement with phenomena in the world. Pedagogically the project aimed to cultivate epistemic heterogeneity (Rosebery et al., 2010) and onto-epistemic navigation between Indigenous ways of knowing and western ways of knowing in sense-making and embodied practice.

This study utilizes interaction analysis of Artscience making and walking/observing activities. We present examples of youth cultivating relationships with more-than-humans and argue that developing making spaces based in youths epistemic ecologies enable expansive forms of making reflective of Indigenous forms of human-nature relations. This work expands our understandings of issues of equity in making and in mathematics learning by considering how making necessarily is a cultural activity that reflects particular epistemic practices that have consequences for how we think about and design mathematics learning environments.

We have engaged over 120 1st–12th grade Indigenous youth in complex ecological systems learning in field-based settings utilizing ArtScience pedagogies during 2-week summer camps.
To document the various activities throughout the camps, video, audio recordings, and field notes of the making activities as well as interviews with youth and adults have been collected and form the basis of the data for this study. The data was logged in five-minute intervals across each summer and tagged with key markers of making, Indigenous knowledge systems and practice configurations.

Results: The practice of making as a continual cultural practice and the enactment of nature-culture relations provided opportunities for youth to assert culturally-based ways of being and doing. By engaging in historically rooted Indigenous practices of making and walking/observing, youth reported a greater sense of responsibility to maintain strong cultural ties to their communities. Making and observational practices represented a resurgent and humanizing form of contributing to the physical and spiritual well being of their own communities.

Scholarly Significance: The work that has taken place in the Indigenous STEAM camp and our efforts to document youth restoring relationships with land, water and communities serve as an initial articulation of how Indigenous making, walking/observing can expand understandings of equity and mathematics learning. From our perspective, living nature-culture relations through Indigenous making and walking/observing establish futurity and act as a direct refusal to Indigenous erasure.

Authors

• Filiberto Barajas-Lopez, University of Washington

• Megan Bang, The Spencer Foundation