Page 425 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

400 B.C. Luitel and P.C. Taylor

A frog slips into a pond
No route visible to the outside
Locked in forever

Informed by different views about foundationalism, I am charting the journey
of letter writing through three themes. First, I present myself as a critic of anti-
scepticism embedded in the project of foundationalism. The second part of this
letter challenges the decontextualisation of knowledge and knowing embedded in
your narrow foundationalism. Finally, I critique mimetic and transmissionist peda-
gogies that arise from your exclusive view of foundationalism, thereby offering
alternative visions of inclusive pedagogies for contextualised mathematics teacher
education program.
Welcome Healthy Scepticism
Dear Dr. Authority, let me start this part of the letter by sharing an experience in
2004 when I worked with a teacher educator who had recently graduated from a
teacher education program of a university in Nepal. I invited him to collaborate
with me to facilitate a 3-day teacher education workshop on teaching geometry for
high school teachers. I asked him to share his workshop plan with me and I pre-
pared myself with the same. His plan to facilitate the teaching of proof in geometry
could not offer any new insights into creative pedagogical aspects; rather it entailed
a plan for teaching teachers about the basic concepts associated with proofs of some
theorems. I shared with him my plan of including a narrative of my experience of
learning geometry (e.g., Drake and Sherin 2006) and of involving teachers in a two-
stage play about different types of geometry. In all my workshop activities, my plan
was to help teachers maintain some degree of scepticism in their thinking and
actions. But my collaborator came next day to express his inability to use such
activities because he believed that it was an irreparable sin to be critical about
mathematics whilst being a mathematics teacher educator. After several attempts, I
convinced him to use some props that could help teachers think about boundary
conditions of geometric proofs being employed in our school curriculum.