Abstract
How can we address the problem of culturally decontextualised mathematics education faced by Nepali students who, as citizens of the world’s most recent democracy, are far from realising the positive contribution of mathematics education to the development of a socially just, egalitarian and pluralist society?
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Notes
- 1.
The West is a metaphor deriving from the historic perception of cultural separation of the Occident and the Orient. This separation has often been used to consider the Occident as superior to the Orient. Historically, the Orient is regarded as exotic, abnormal and irrational, whereas the West is depicted as normal, rational and natural (Said 1978).
- 2.
As a matter of convention, I have used the symbol ‘/’ (e.g., un/certain, im/pure, un/wittingly) to represent a dialectical relationship between sometimes opposing entities, ideas and concepts. Dialectical logic promotes holism by combining opposing viewpoints, perspectives, entities and ideas. Although Hegel is widely acknowledged for the development of dialectical logic, recent explorations have demonstrated that there are more than one type of dialectical logic (Wong 2006).
- 3.
The Western Modern Worldview promotes a restricted way of knowing, being and valuing imbued in reductionist thinking, instrumental actions and mechanistic ontology (Taylor 2008).
- 4.
Metonym is a metaphor in which part of a concept is taken to represent the whole concept. In the case of globalisation, which is a multifaceted concept (comprising conversation, exchange, discourse, etc.), often only one of its aspects (Westernisation) is taken to represent the whole concept (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).
- 5.
In rural Nepali contexts, children learn various skills from their grandparents. As sitting with grandmother entails a pedagogy of care and empathy, it has a possibility of being used as a transformative pedagogy (of care) in mathematics education. Similarly, knowing how to plough can be used as a special form of pedagogy that includes a task with dissimilar subtasks and subskills. Another popular saying: if you engage constantly in the field, plants will recognise you, can also be used as a pedagogical referent for learning through engagement in contexts.
- 6.
In eastern Wisdom Traditions, Middle Way has served as a perspective to articulate ontological and epistemological spaces that allow us to conceive the relative nature of sometimes opposing ideas (Nagarjuna et al., 1990).
- 7.
Smitherman (2005) calls these logics ‘narrow analytics,’ which are subservient to reductionist Newtonian science, which promotes dualism and narratives of stability.
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Luitel, B.C., Taylor, P.C. (2010). “What Is Ours and What Is Not Ours?”: Inclusive Imaginings of Contextualised Mathematics Teacher Education. In: Tippins, D., Mueller, M., van Eijck, M., Adams, J. (eds) Cultural Studies and Environmentalism. Cultural Studies of Science Education, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_33
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