Ecological Mathematics Education: Critical and Postcritical Possibilities

• In Event: 15.048 - Is Another Mathematics Possible? Mathematics and the Living World

Abstract

There is a vibrant and growing sociopolitical field within mathematics education research and scholarship. This field has a number of rich and important sub-fields including ethnomathematics (e.g., Rosa, D'Ambrosio et al.) critical mathematics education (Skvosmose and Nielsen, 1996), mathematics for social justice (e.g. Gutstein, 2006), feminist perspectives and post-modern influenced critiques and contributions (e.g. Walshaw 2004). However, ecological concerns are only recently beginning to be addressed from these perspectives. Extending this sociopolitical current, and its contributory parts to embrace ecological concerns is an urgent task for mathematics educators given the urgency of social and ecological crises.
In order to support this development, it is useful to consider how ecologically orientated mathematics education can be viewed through the lens of previously identified orientations in responses to more general sociopolitical issues in education.
Although formulated in different ways, scholars taking critical perspectives on oppression; related to disability (Lalvani, 2013), race (Sleeter and Grant, 1999), sexuality; (Goldstein, Russell, & Daley, 2007) and gender (Asher, 2005), amongst other characteristics, have identified conservative, socially liberal and critical responses (reference removed for purpose of review; Chubbuck, 2010; Gorski, 2009; Kumashiro, 2000);
When applied to ecological concerns this distinction can support discernment of:
o more conservative orientations that include environmental issues in the curriculum but with an underlying message or paradigm of individual responsibility and amelioration
o socially liberal responses that can lead to a re-imagining of the curriculum as a whole and a recognition that there are issues of social justice bound up with environmental issues
o critical responses that envisage radically different eco-related pedagogies and a recognition that ecological justice requires profound social transformation.
However, in taking a turn towards an ecopedagogy, the possibility also emerges of a post-critical (Andreotti, 2010) response. Such a response embraces a vital materialism (Bennett, 2009) that decentres the human as a unique ethical actor and focus of concern and interrogates what mathematical knowledge is or could be (Gutiérrez, 2017). Such a post critical response also entails beginning to question the focus on particular 'ends' or goals of mathematics education in the first place (Coles, 2017). Post-critical responses support disruptive and creative actions that both embrace and engage with a world in crisis (reference removed for purpose of review), but one that is also a world of enchantment (Bennett, 2001) and astonishment (Roth, 2016). This points to a mathematics rooted in ethics of relationships.

Author

• Mark Boylan, Sheffield Hallam University