Decolonization and Rehumanizing Mathematics in Teacher Education: Sensing New Relations

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Abstract

This paper reflects on the future of mathematics education and the need to unlearn practices that position culture, bodies, and emotions as irrelevant or obstacles to teaching and learning. Based in sociopolitical approaches to mathematics education (Goffney, Gutiérrez, & Boston, 2018) and a transformative approach to teaching-learning (Stetsenko, 2017), I challenge traditional educational frameworks in mathematics. I illustrate how decolonizing and rehumanizing pedagogical practices with bodies, emotions, and culturally and community-centered pedagogies transform pre-service teacher learning.

Cognitivist learning theories (Resnick, 2017, Carpenter et. al, 1999) often position learning as brain/mind-based and demonstrated through verbal communication, reading, and writing. In contrast, learning and knowing from decolonial (Kulago et. al, 2021), sociocultural (Vygotsky, 1981), and sociopolitical (Goffney, Gutierrez, & Boston, 2021) stances can broaden our frame toward activity and relationship between one another and the land. Nicol et. al (2020) offers that through decolonial ontoepistemologies, mathematical ways of being “embody different classifications, different logics, and different ways of relating to phenomena” outside of universality, objectivity, power, progress, and control (p. 192). Further, Bishop (1990) writes, “If your culture encourages you to believe, instead, that everything belongs and exists in its relationship with everything else, then removing it [mathematical practices] from its context makes it literally meaningless (p. 57)”. This paper takes a decolonial stance to emphasize the centrality of relations (human to more-than-human, spatial to temporal) to mathematical knowing.

I describe practices for two different childhood mathematics education college courses typically taken by graduate students of varied teaching and learning experiences. In the first course, I incorporate practices and systems that explore how our feelings, emotions & bodies are invitations to amplify practices of collective care and deepen approaches to mathematical knowing. Practices include establishing student-teacher small groups to design and lead number talks with elementary grade afterschool students and then make space for revisions. Systemic pieces include unbound (time-wise) collective check-ins to share insights and offer pathways to navigating tensions.

In the second course, I incorporate an assignment entitled community and cultural connections in mathematics project (Harper et al., 2015). This assignment includes a community walk to develop preservice teachers' mathematical gaze in everyday community math practices. Students research effective mathematics practices connected to the development of big mathematical ideas (Boaler, Munson, & Williams, 2021). In pairs, students create complex math tasks (Horn, 2012), open ended scenarios that allows for diverse approaches to problem solving, that is connected to the community or cultural math practices observed. Students were asked to facilitate this task with a family member or student connected to the community and reflect on that process.

Through an iterative analysis, I examine memos, prepared materials, student-created math tasks, and course reflections. Emergent insights will refer to frames of decolonization and rehumanization regarding reverberations from the pedagogical processes attempting to delinking from a force of objectivity and emphasize mathematx (Gutierrez, 2019). Finally, I connect back to Stetsenko’s transformative activist stance and present moment of transformations and contradiction as students broaden diverse mathematical ways of being and knowing.

Author

• Atasi Das, Lehman College - CUNY