"Kyuo" or Speaking the Truth: Crossing Cultural Borders to Make Sense of Mathematics Preservice Teacher Education

• In Event: Exploring the Role of Borders in Mathematics Preservice Teacher Education

Abstract

In this presentation, we present our take on duoethnographic methodology in order to make sense of our practice as mathematics pre-service teacher educators. In doing so, we think of borders as methodological borders between established or emerging methodologies such as duoethnography and non-Western worldviews. In particular, we employ the Kamba concept of kyuo that Kamba elders in Kenya use to encourage community members to speak the “truth” of their experiences. According to Kamba traditions, only kyuo spoken within a community of people helps in the making of fair judgment. Conversely, if a judgment/decision is made without including others’ kyuos, the decision/judgment is incomplete.

The concept of kyuo is contrasted with duoethnography, an emerging methodological approach introduced in early 2000s (Norris & Sawyer, 2012). As an emerging methodology, its rules are not completely established (Breault, 2016) and even if the methodology had a strict canon with completely established norms and rules, we would still break them since methodology should be molded to fit the goal – the most authentic description of the phenomena under investigation (Lincoln, Lynham, & Guba, 2011). In this paper, we report on the use of kyuo and duoethnography to make sense of our practice as immigrant mathematics pre-service teacher educators in a predominately white institution in the South Eastern United States.

Based on the duoethnographic piece we wrote about standardization in teacher education through a year-long process of dialogue and writing, we analyzed audio recordings, notes, and reflections on our research in order to map out the emergence of methodology that molds Kamba notions of collaboration with Western practices of generative writing (Boice, 1990) and duoethnography. The resulting process embraces the Western academic notion that duoethnography brings together “two complex beings situated within their own complex social networks” (Breault, 2016, p. 780) and contrasts it with collective meaning making within the community that kyuo espouses. For the purpose of understanding collective meaning making, we evoked Kamba saying that a calabash shines when it passes through multiple hands. Similarly, the idea gets refined when it passes through multiple minds. In the process of “shining” and “refining”, it became difficult for us to take the authorship of a particular idea the way that it is presented in the standard duoethnography (i.e. as a dramatic dialogue). Thus, besides using the dialogue format, we also used the text in italics to indicate emergent concepts that came from the two of us simultaneously. This contradicts the tenets of duoethnography that dismiss arriving at a collective resolution (Norris & Sawyer, 2012). Our study illustrates Breault’s (2016) claim that duoethnography is not a fixed methodology and our insistence that methodology should not be a set of canons but rather the means to tell stories in the most authentic way.

Authors

• Nenad Radakovic, College of Charleston

• mutindi ndunda, College of Charleston