Page 411 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

386 B.C. Luitel and P.C. Taylor

enculturation into a globalising western worldview (Luitel 2009; Luitel and Taylor
2007). In the process, mathematics education may be contributing by neglect to the
tragic extinction of local knowledge systems characterised by holistic integration of
mathematics, science and cosmology.
As we see it, the challenge for Nepal, and many other countries of non-western
heritage, is not one of rejecting decontextualised mathematics education in some
naive essentialist attempt to protect threatened cultural identities and practices from
the rising tide of globalisation. To do so would be to deny, amongst other things,
the importance of preparing Nepali professionals who can think globally and act
locally. Rather, our vision is for a mathematics education of and for all the people
of Nepal, a truly democratic mathematics education that promotes sustainable
cultural pluralism by enabling young Nepalese people to reconcile the existential
tension they experience as their own local cultural traditions are buffeted by the
unrelenting and highly disorienting encounter with globalisation and its seemingly
superior “world standard” practices and values. The first step in addressing the
problem is to reveal the deeply hegemonic grip of this restrictive form of mathe-
matics education on the hearts and minds of those who control the institutions of
higher education, the sector that is instrumental in reproducing the extant culture
of “world standard” mathematics, mathematics education and mathematics teacher
education. The second step is to re-vision that culture via a scholarly process of
utopic imagining.
We do so in this chapter by examining the lived experience of Bal (the first
author) as a transformative mathematics teacher educator struggling to renegotiate
and re-vision the “world standard” mathematics teacher education program of a
Nepali university. Subscribing to Brickhouse and Kittleson’s (2006) emphasis on
the coexistence of multiple knowledge systems in science education, we also draw
from the discourse on the inclusive nature of mathematics that allows different (and
often contrasting) knowledge systems to develop empowering synergies in mathe-
matics teaching, learning and assessment (e.g., Ernest 2004). We employ contem-
porary educational theories, logics and genres integrated within a multi-paradigmatic
research design (Taylor et al., in press) to identify disempowering assumptions that
may be contributing to the hegemonic stranglehold of culturally decontextualised
mathematics education. Drawing on the research paradigms of interpretivism, criti-
calism and postmodernism, we weave together the methods of critical autoethnog-
raphy and philosophical inquiry to construct a collage of storied, poetic,
performative, visual and letter-writing genres (Knowles and Cole 2008).
The chapter is divided into two sections. In the first, we present Bal’s composite
story, based on his experience of working with educational leaders in Nepal, to
illustrate how globalisation can manifest as a disempowering ideology in mathe-
matics teacher education programs. In an open letter to the story character,
Dr. Director, we examine critically the narrowly conceived metaphor of globalisa-
tion as universalism, focussing on how it promotes the ideology of comprador
intelligentsias who serve the political interests of colonial masters whilst undermin-
ing the value of culturally situated knowledge systems. With the help of dialectical
logic, we discuss the possibility of employing the concept of glocalisation as an