After plantations’ precarities: curating math-thematic curriculum plots in initial teacher education for multispecies’ flourishing and a freedom-yet-to-come

ABSTRACT

We give an unconventional, mythopoetic response to the question of Why teach mathematics to all learners in school? In our work with pre-service teachers, we attempt to teach how to value the vulnerability of the multispecies world in a relational, anti-colonial way through passionate immersion, and to use mathematics education towards the ends of promoting its and our own (human) flourishing through taking on relationships of curatorial care. Our contribution includes the novel theoretical assemblage and elaboration of the metaphors of plot and curating as “medicine” [Doolittle, E. (2007). Mathematics as medicine – plenary lecture. In P. Liljedahl (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2006 CMESG Annual Meeting (17–25), Burnaby, BC, Canada.] for addressing challenging ethical questions for mathematics education [Karrow, D., Khan, S., & Fleener, Y. (2017). Mathematics education’s ethical relation with and response to climate change. Philosophy of Mathematics Education Journal, 32 (Special Issues on Mathematics Education and the Living World: Responses to Ecological Crisis). ISBN: 1465-2978.] of its ongoing relationship with the precarity produced by unexamined plantation commitments.

KEYWORDS:

• Curating
• multispecies
• curriculum studies

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The use value described here is that of a communal use value required for survival etc., which we have located in a number of parallel but not isomorphic scenarios. This form of traditional use value rubs against the more traditional understanding of use value in modern economics, which is a simpler conception related to capitalism's penchant for manufacturing wants, needs, and desires.

2 The argument in this paper follows Best, Walcott and others like Glissant who recognize in the seed conditions and developmental trajectory of the Caribbean and Americas key elements still at play in world systems today (economic, political, and educational among others).

3 Typically white, cis-male, able-bodied, heterosexual and older as well as Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (W.E.I.R.D.) (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).

4 Curating also signals the increasing work of teachers and teacher educators whose attention is rhizomatically fragmented by having to review and judiciously select from the increasing diversity of (often very similar) options but we are not working with that sense in this work.

5 A more traditional rendering of curation within mathematics education is one where the curator serves as a gate-keeper. We want to acknowledge this variant and clearly juxtapose it with our foregrounding of the ethics and poetics of relationality entailed by acts of curation in mathematics education.

Additional information

Funding

This work is made possible by a Faculty Startup Grant, University of Alberta SAS Award, CMASTE Faculty Projects Award, and Alberta Ministry of Education Grants.