Toward a reflexive mathematics education within local and global relations: thinking from critical scholarship on mathematics education within the sociopolitical, global citizenship education and decoloniality

ABSTRACT

Education commonly is positioned as central to developing citizens who can address so-called global challenges. Responses are identifiable in global citizenship education, which may recruit mathematics into interdisciplinary relationships, and within mathematics education itself. However, if notions of the global and local, the citizen, mathematics, and mathematics education, are brought together uncritically, responses may inadvertently reproduce the inequities they seek to disrupt. In this conceptual article, we interrogate how and with what implications these notions are given meaning in mathematics education. We also think toward notions of place, subjectivity, relations, mathematics, and mathematics education, in a way that recognises power and differences that matter, without one place being synonymous with the universal, and one peoples considered superior. We articulate these ideas in questions for provoking scholar-practitioners' critical, reflexive thinking. For our contribution, we think from critical scholarship on mathematics education within the sociopolitical, global citizenship education and decoloniality.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical global citizenship education
• critical decoloniality
• critical mathematics education within the sociopolitical

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We follow Green (2020) in using mathematics with a capital “M” (similarly Science), for knowledge that has come to be regarded as authoritative, universal ‘truth’. We use mathematics for a plurality of historical, sociopolitical practices that are changing and subject to question.

2 We use mathematics education within the sociopolitical collectively for scholarship named as critical mathematics education, mathematics for social justice, ethnomathematics, indigenous knowledge, equity research, decolonial mathematics education, and critical global citizenship mathematics education.

3 Arguments about cultural and linguistic ‘colonisation’ of Scotland itself by England have been critiqued (e.g. L. Connell, 2004).