Part 1: At the beginning of the reading, Leroy Little Bear (2000) states that colonialism “tries to maintain a singular social order by means of force and law, suppressing the diversity of human worldviews. … Typically, this proposition creates oppression and discrimination” (p. 77). Think back on your experiences of the teaching and learning of mathematics — were there aspects of it that were oppressive and/or discriminating for you or other students?

When I was in elementary school I really did not like math. Each thing that we thing learned had multiple strategies you could use to solve the question. Normally I would say that is a very good thing because it accommodates more students and their different ways of thinking. However, we weren’t allowed to find out which strategy we liked best and then use it to solve each question. Instead, we always had to know how to use each strategy to solve the problem and we were tested on our ability to do each of the strategies. Which, to me, seems to defeat the point of having multiple strategies or ways to solve the problem if you are just going to force all the students to use every single strategy anyways. I remember in grade 5 our class decided to go on “strike” and we wrote “no more strategies” on paper and taped the paper to rulers and marched around at the start of math class. Our teacher offered us suckers if we stopped and of course we took the suckers and continued on learning strategies which were counterintuitive because trying to understand all the strategies just made everything more confusing.

Thankfully by grade 7 teachers started to understand the purpose of teaching various strategies. So, the whole class was taught each strategy but then in assignments and tests we could use whichever strategy made the most sense to us to solve each problem. In my experience, once you get into high school math classes there seems to be only one right answer and only one way to get there. Thankfully for me this worked and I actually liked it better than having a lot of different strategies because it didn’t seem like there was such an overwhelming amount of strategies to chose from. However, I can see how it is oppressive for other students how maybe don’t think in the way the teachers explains how to solve the problem and then they are left with no other option than to try to wrap their head around it which would result in taking longer to do assignment and tests.

Part 2: After reading Poirier’s article: Teaching mathematics and the Inuit Community, identify at least three ways in which Inuit mathematics challenge Eurocentric ideas about the purposes of mathematics and the way we learn it.

One way that was very apparent in the reading and in lecture was how Inuit mathematics are done in base-20 rather than base-10. When I read that they use a different base then we do it reminded me of my math 101 class in my first semester of university because we learned how to do equations in different bases but it was very difficult for me to wrap my head around and I went to a tutor in the student success centre a couple times before I could really figure it out. Honestly before that math 101 class I actually had no idea that math could be done in different base systems because I was only ever exposed to the Eurocentric base-10 system and was never even taught that our number system was in base-10. So, I just thought that numbers and mathematics were a universal thing. Another way Inuit mathematics challenges Eurocentric ideas of mathematics is by exposing the linguistic hierarchy. Canada’s colonial education places English above any other language. This was really seen in the article when it wasn’t taken into consideration that Inuktitut is traditionally and oral language. The dominant Eurocentric ideals can make us blind to other ways of communication because we are so immersed in English, which uses both oral and written communication, that we see it as the norm. Inuit Mathematics also challenges Eurocentric ideas is through teaching styles. The example Poirier gives in the reading is that “Traditional Inuit teaching is based on observing an elder or listening to enigmas… Furthermore, Inuit teachers tell me that, traditionally, they do not ask a student a question for which they think that student does not have the answer” (55). This definitely difference to the Eurocentric “paper-and-pencil exercises” (55) as Poirier would call it.