Page 419 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

394 B.C. Luitel and P.C. Taylor

a process of acting from within a pre-existing distorted framework, thereby
undermining its interaction with the outside (social, cultural and political contexts)
(Mezirow 2005). It is highly likely that a reform process will be locked in the narrow
framework of “re-forming schools through curriculum change” without looking to
broader possibilities for helping them shift from a singular worldview to multiplistic
worldviews. On the contrary, a transformative agent acknowledges that such a
reformist view may be necessary but is insufficient for changing mathematics
teacher education in a sustainable way. She/he is likely to acknowledge the disem-
powering posture of any pre-existing distorted framework, thereby making it visible
by bringing many other frameworks to exist in the process.

Staying away from the edge
Confirming the order
Sign of a good follower

Third, a comprador intelligentsia is an attitude that flourishes well with the help of
control and hegemony (Juan 2007). As a comprador is taken to represent the person
who plays the role of intermediary, the notion of intelligentsia gives the connotation
of a learned, knowledgeable and trained person. As a result, comprador intelligentsias
are able to impose their ideas on teachers and teacher educators who are believed to
be less learned or lacking “advanced degrees” from western universities. On the
contrary, the person who works for a transformative endeavour in teacher education
is aware of possible hegemonic and control-propelling situations, thereby acting for
empowering changes in the landscape of mathematics teacher education.
Fourth, I envisage that without a disempowering global order (such as globali-
sation as universalisation), the comprador intelligentsia-attitude will fade out
from the field of mathematics teacher education (McLaren 2005). For a comprador
intelligentsia, global order provides him/her with a much-needed framework to
condemn local practices and knowledge systems for allegedly being primitive. Let
me share an experience with you. Once I was talking with a teacher educator
about possibilities of including culturally contextualised pedagogies such as sitting
with grandmother, knowing how to plough and learning through perpetual engage-
ment. His response was that these pedagogies are not proven enough to be valid
6
for our formal education system. Unlike this dismissive posture towards our
culturally generated knowledge systems, a transformative attitude is likely to act
inclusively, thereby creating meaningful synergies between local and global orders.
Informed by such views, transformative perspectives can be a deconstructive
Trojan horse to the comprador intelligentsia-attitude (Bowers 2005).

6 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 trans-
formative 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.