Mathematics Education's Ethical Relation With and Response to Climate Change

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

Abstract

Situated in K-12 pre-service teacher education, we explore the question of the role of mathematics education in relating with and responding to the ecological and social challenges of anthropogenic climate change. We argue that mathematics education must move beyond a preoccupation with economics to one founded by virtue ethics. Specifically, an Ethic of Care (Noddings, 1984). We advocate for mathematics education's ethical relation with climate change as it is the central ecological organizing issue of this century, requires immanent attention and action, and would benefit from mathematics itself as a unique way of understanding the complexity and interrelationship of the phenomenon itself.
We first situate the work by taking an historic overview of mathematics education and the social purposes it has served (Harouni, 2015). This leads us into a critique of neo-liberalism's effect on contemporary mathematics education, in particular we draw on arguments that show that neoliberalism exerts its influence through education policy, which in turn, influences curriculum-the what, the why, and the how of what is to be taught within K-12 schools (Brown, 2015; Gutstein, 2010; Petrina, 2004; Schwab, 1969) and which consequently shifts the 'purpose of education' from the development of the student to the development of the economy.
Next we draw on complexity theory to sketch out mathematics education's relation with climate change. Complexity theory (Davis, Sumara & Luce-Kapler, 2008) and its uptake by mathematics education offers a new metaphor and approach to understanding our world and our place in it that is relational and ecological, ethical, and emergent. Complex knowing places the learner within the system and is supported by an "emergentist" epistemology, where knowledge is a response to rather than absorption of information. Learning is therefore not an acquisition and accumulation of knowledge but is a process of engagement, self-organizational process of learning at higher and higher levels of complexity, within an understanding that all knowledge is uncertain and situational. Mathematics and mathematics education can respond to the character of climate change by modeling the very types of thinking necessary to make sense of the phenomenon itself.
We present several examples from media reports on teaching (Kaplan, 2017), teacher research (Bigelow & Swinehart, 2015) and personal experiences of teaching. We will offer at least one practical curricular example of an emergentist mathematics curriculum drawn from an integrated pre-service elementary science course involving the longitudinal recording and analysis of maple tree tapping by pre-service teachers.
We see a mathematics education informed by complexity theory as capable of supporting the ethical imperative of understanding education's role in addressing climate change and that embodying an Ethic of Care is long overdue and necessary. We feel that there is an urgency to this ethical act especially given the privileged position of mathematics and mathematics education in today's educational systems.

Authors

• Steven Khan, University of Alberta

• Douglas David Karrow, Brock University

• M. Jayne Fleener, North Carolina State University