Week 9: Oppressive Mathematics
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?
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.
I cannot think of any specific instances where my teaching or learning of mathematics was oppressive and/or discriminating in my early years of school. After some medical complications in high school, I ended up finishing my last few credits from adult campus. There were a lot of problems with examples using western customs, for example card games, there were a lot of students in my classes then that were brand new to Canada and had no prior understanding of these examples used. I remember my teacher attempted to explain a few of these examples, but after a couple minutes gave up and moved on. The students who had little knowledge of these games/customs or who struggled with English just sat and watched, not know what was going on and I am sure most to all of them got mercy passed so he didn’t have to teach them again or found themselves back in the exact same room next semester to retake the course.
Poirier’s article about teaching mathematics within the Inuit community, raises ideas of teaching mathematics that are not typical western ways of thinking of teaching mathematics. Three of these ideas include:
1. “Counting: the systematic use of methods to compare and order sets of objects
2. Localization: the exploration of one’s spatial environment and the symbolization of that environment with the help of models, diagrams, drawings, words, or other means
3. Measuring: the use of objects or measuring tools to quantify dimensions”
All these ideas take learnings of mathematics and puts the knowledge into everyday tasks and hands on execution. An example of this would be measuring, being able to measure and create clothing to protect their bodies from their cold climates.