The Role of Mathematics Teacher Education in Overcoming Narrow Neocolonial Views of Mathematics

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, teacher education has changed to incorporate a larger emphasis on understanding students’ sociocultural backgrounds, knowing that these influence their learning. However, in terms of mathematics and mathematics education in teacher education, less has been done to recognise the sociocultural mathematics backgrounds of students. An example is provided to show how entrenched colonial attitudes to mathematics have developed into neocolonial policies that influence mathematics education. This example is based on a large historic research project in Papua New Guinea (PNG) that aimed to document and analyse the nature of mathematics education from tens of thousands of years ago to the present. Data sources varied from records of first contact and later records, archaeology, oral histories, language analyses, lived experiences, memoirs, government documents, field studies, and previous research especially doctoral studies. The impacts of colonisation, post-colonial aid and globalisation on mathematics education have been analysed, establishing an understanding of the current status of mathematics education as neocolonial. Neocolonial education policies diminish cultural ways of thinking. Thus, teacher education has an important role in sensitizing preservice and inservice teachers to the impact of neocolonial approaches as well as in developing with students some ways of reducing this impact and encouraging more holistic, culturally relevant mathematics education.

Bringing Critical Mathematics Education and Actor–Network Theory to a Statistics Course in Mathematics Teacher Education: Actants for Articulating Complexity in Student Teachers’ Foregrounds

“…In particular, the use of societal challenges such as climate change can be a thematic context for student teachers to enact critical pedagogical imagination, awareness, and sensitivity with respect to the embedded complexity. Moreover, critical mathematics education provides ways of enacting mathematical thinking grounded in cultural complexity [41] and becomes exemplified in cases where thematic contexts and contents reflect the desired culture of the curriculum, which risks ignoring the cultural diversity of the teaching and learning situation. The importance of CME when the thematic context of climate change is emphasized in teacher education was embraced by the student teachers in different ways.…”