Page 429 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

404 B.C. Luitel and P.C. Taylor

with animals (Harzem 2004)? Let me share one instance that has some bearing on
this question. It can be sometime in September, 1999 when I was involved in a
teacher training program. I had written a training manual on teaching equations
by using fictive stories (Raymond and Leinenbach 2000). My plan was to help
teachers promote student-centred learning. After several orientation sessions on
using those stories in the classroom, some of the trainee teachers used this approach
in their teaching and it turned out to be effective. In the meantime, I invited a math-
ematics teacher trainer who was working in the Ministry of Education of Nepal to
share this experience. After the class observation, he commented that the teachers
did not teach essential “basic facts” about equations apart from entertaining students
with some humdrum activities. Might the teacher educator not be using a founda-
tional view in making such comments? His comments seem to be a result of your
foundationalism-oriented mathematics teacher education program that largely
promotes mimetic and transmissionist (e.g., rote-learning, drill, and blind practice)
pedagogical practices.
Thus, I argue here that mimetic and transmissionist pedagogies embedded in
narrow foundationalism do not help conceive mathematics in multiple ways as they
seem to promote only one type of knowing, that is, conceptual knowing (Egan
1997). Why does your foundationalism promote only this type of knowing? Perhaps,
it is because of the hegemony of the behaviouristic paradigm that you can measure
the extent to which conceptual definitions are recalled, theorem proofs are repro-
duced, formulae are remembered and algorithms are unquestioningly replicated.
Is this pedagogy sufficiently helpful for bringing meaningfulness to mathematics
education? Perhaps, such mimetic and transmissionist pedagogies can be a key
factor in the rampant underachievement in school mathematics as reported by recent
national studies (EDSC 1997, 2003).
Dear Dr. Authority, I would like to invite you to consider this proposal. Rather
than living for a single foundation or theory or philosophy, let us try to live for
meaningful pedagogic transformation. In my mind promoting multiple ways of
knowing (and learning and teaching) helps rescue mathematics education from
such a narrow pedagogy of transmission. Here, my notion of “multiple ways of
knowing” is about accounting for conceptual, reflective, critical and imaginative
knowings imbued in the view of multiple intelligences (Eisner 2004). The notion of
reflective knowing is about accounting for autobiographic moments in the impulses
of learning, thereby helping students to connect mathematics with their personal
experiences. I envisage that reflective knowing entails the very act of unveiling
implicit and explicit mathematics embedded in students’ everyday lifeworlds.
Critical knowing is an orientation towards examining disempowering forces that
promote dogmatic dependence (e.g., privileging the absolutist view of mathematics
as a body of Platonic knowledge) and unfree existence (e.g., treating students as
means to another end) in people’s lives. One possible use of this type of knowing
is: to facilitate our students to conceive that sociocultural reality is also about power
that often creates disempowering relations between different groups of people.
Whilst students use mathematics to solve problems arising from the world around
them, they are likely to unpack such relations (e.g., uneven wealth distributions,