Weaving together the threads of Indigenous knowledge and mathematics: Reflections from reading group meeting

Contributors: Cristina Mio, Manjinder K. Jagdev, Pete Wright, Hilary Povey

The reading group is for those wishing to engage with research literature on TMSJ and discuss its relevance to practice. The eighth online reading group meeting took place on 4^th December 2024. We chose to discuss the 2024 paper titled Weaving together the threads of Indigenous knowledge and mathematics authored by Jodie Hunter and Roberta Hunter from Massey University, Aotearoa/New Zealand (open access).

We began by breaking into smaller groups to discuss the following questions:

• How do the authors propose Indigenous knowledge is centred in mathematics classrooms?
• How do the findings of the paper relate to your own experiences and classroom practice?
• Would you do anything different in future having read this paper?
• What does ‘decoloniality’ mean to us, and what role might it play in teaching maths for social justice?

We were joined for the second half of the meeting by the article’s first author, Jodie Hunter, who helped facilitate a thought-provoking discussion of the issues raised in the paper, prompted by questions and comments from the groups.

Here are some reflections on the paper and the meeting from those who attended …

Cristina Mio, University of Glasgow

I found this article poetic and full of hope. The central role that family, traditions, collectivism and connections have in the Pacific worldview comes through strongly. Three generations of women from the same family contributed, in different ways, to the making of the article.  The two authors, Roberta and Jodie Hunter, are mother and daughter, and Eileen Cavanagh, the authors’ mother and grandmother, created the Tivaevae quilt depicted in one of the figures and used to explain the Tivaevae process as a metaphor for the participatory research design used in the article.  I found embedding personal family history within an academic paper on mathematics education novel inspiring and moving.

During the reading group meeting, Jodie Hunter gave us some background around the paper and the project described in it.  Her words made me realise how little I know about Aotearoa New Zealand and its people’s history, and how different the Aotearoa context is compared to the United Kingdom one (and not just weather-wise!).  But, despite these differences, I found the main messages of her article highly relevant to the UK (and any) context, for example, how important it is for a teacher to get to know and respect their pupils’ family background and to recognise, value and build on the knowledge that each pupil brings with them to the classroom.

Manjinder K. Jagdev, York St. John University

I enjoyed learning about the two different aspects of professional learning and development highlighted in Jodie’s paper i.e. adaptations to the content / curriculum by choosing tasks that are directly relevant to cultural activities (building a canoe); and collectivism (pedagogy) of teachers collaboratively working together with their pupils. This reinforced the message of moving away from a deficit model of learners lacking mathematical knowledge to one that looks for opportunities by incorporating their strengths from cultural contexts. I appreciated the recognition and embodiment of cultural values (respect, humility, reciprocity, relationships and service) in classroom activities which lend themselves to group-work amongst teachers and students. This contrasts with the western, neoliberal and colonial perspectives of mathematics learning and teaching, that permeates and pervades practice across the world. The focus on competition and consumerism in mathematics teaching, and viewing only one way of doing things, limits and constrains mathematical understanding. The social justice values in this research are a refreshing move away from this restrictive world view of ability teaching which has fixed notions of what children can achieve. By incorporating cultural activities, it was inspiring to see both teachers and children benefitting in mutual growth. One of the messages is that anti-colonial and decolonial practice, to make learning more collaborative, is good for everyone. This opportunity allowed both teachers and students to have agency and their voices to be heard. The teaching practices described in Jodie’s work centres children’s cultural experiences for a better way forward in mathematics education.

Pete Wright, University of Dundee

The authors highlight how learners in Aotearoa from Pacific and Māori heritage tend to be marginalised by learning environments dominated by Western principles of individualism and competition. These learners often experience dissonance between their own collectivist values and beliefs, generated through their cultural backgrounds, and the school curriculum. The authors highlight the success of anti-colonial practices, drawing on relational and responsive pedagogies, that promote collectivist approaches to learning and reposition students as co-constructors of knowledge. These findings resonate with the work that many of us within the TMSJN are engaged in around promoting socially-just approaches to mathematics teaching. Such approaches are also centred around developing collaborative learning, open discussion and student agency. What the authors describe as ‘Western’ values and beliefs, we might instead describe as ‘neo-liberal’ values and beliefs, which dominate practices and discourses within schools in the UK, and lead to the marginalisation of different groups and serve to reproduce existing inequities. In common with the authors, I believe an essential pre-requisite for moving towards a truly transformative curriculum is for mathematics educators to reflect critically on existing practices and discourses, and to recognise the disempowering role that they play.

Hilary Povey, Professor Emerita at Sheffield Hallam University

I have two immediate reflections. First, living and working in England, as I read the paper I was continually being prompted to make comparisons between Indigenous knowledges and pedagogy on the one hand and social class on the other. For example:

• “Developing anti-colonisation practices (Developing practices which challenge class-based injustices) requires educators to begin by surfacing the impact of colonisation (working class oppression under capitalism) on education systems and recognising and acknowledging (such oppression)racism as a key root of inequality … this means examining how cultural and cognitive imperialism represented in classroom interactions and the curriculum perpetuate inequality … practices guided by individualism, progress, and consumerism, undermine other ways of understanding the world.” (Hunter and Hunter, 2024, p.503)
• “… taking a collectivist approach to mathematics learning can be a form of transformative learning which resists oppression and domination.” (Hunter and Hunter, 2024, p.504)

Whilst this comparison may work for pedagogy and traditional cultural values, it is less clear with respect to Indigenous knowledges. Is there such a thing as working class knowledges? Has there ever been?  If so, how might they be recognised? If not, why not? These are all questions I will ponder further.

Second, I feel the need to trouble “the West” and “Western”. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (1992) argue that “the West” is not a geographical term but a concept (for example, it includes Australia and Japan but would not have included eastern Europe before the collapse of the Soviet Union). It denotes a type of society, one that is ‘developed, industrialized, urbanized, capitalist, secular, and modern’ (my emphasis, p 142). If this is the case, then the ‘Western world individualised values … [and] Western world view’ (Hunter and Hunter, 2024, p 504) are hegemonic rather than universal and are held not in the interests of all but in the interests of the dominant class under capitalism.