A Socio-Ecological Turn in Mathematics Education: Reflecting on Curriculum Innovation

Abstract

This article proposes that mathematics education has reached a socio-ecological turn. I identify three strands to this turn. Firstly, current advances in the sciences point to the interconnectivity of life and the ecologies living within and without human bodies. Secondly, advances in the humanities point towards the need to re-think human and non-human relations. And thirdly, the ecological precarity of the world points to the need to re-think the purposes and aims of mathematics education. Two possible curriculum innovations, in response to a socio-ecological turn, are offered. In one case, the curriculum starts from a pressing ecological issue facing a community. In the second case, in a more standard schooling context, a communal mathematics is promoted, with an emphasis on students asking their own questions. A commonality is the dramatization of the curriculum.

The role of mathematics teacher educators in preparing teachers of mathematics to respond to global challenges within their classrooms

“…We have been inspired by this diagram to offer a version (see Figure 1), focused on the work of teachers of mathematics, which helps us think about our work as MTEs. We have drawn on each school: taking from the Freirean school the concept of generative themes; taking from Foucault the significance of the sociopolitical, to which we add the significance of the socio-ecological (Coles, 2022); and taking from the Nordic school the three forms of knowing and the formatting power of mathematics. To exemplify the framework, a teacher may recognise the significance of air pollution in their local area and decide they want to research it; at the point they then decide to offer something in their classroom on this topic, their awareness of the socio-ecological issue of air pollution has become a generative theme for them, since it has linked to actions.…”

Towards a socio-ecological practice of mathematics teacher education

“…Such a focus is made clear in depictions of Bronfenbrenner's diagram of interacting layers, where the individual is at the centre of the image, which the outer layers (microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and macrosystem) help to explain. With a group of scholars, I have been using the phrase "socio-ecological" (Coles, le Roux, Solares-Rojas, 2022) to point to something slightly different, where the intention is precisely to move away from a focus on the individual. We take inspiration from work that has considered the socio-political dimensions of mathematics education (Valero, 2004) and seek to extend this into the ecological.…”

Editorial for a special issue on innovating the mathematics curriculum in precarious times

“…Yet it takes us a next step towards illustrating curriculum innovation, in terms of surfacing the ecological explicitly. Empirically, these authors are concerned with socio-ecological problems (Coles, 2022) − historical, ecological, social, industrial, economic, and health − faced by the Atoyac River community in Mexico. Specifically, centring questions about loss of biodiversity due to industrial pollution in the local Atoyac River, the collaborative curriculum innovation, realised in the Atoyac River Memorial Museum school project, integrates school learning, new curricular connections, disciplinary knowledge, and actual problem-solving with issues facing the region's inhabitants.…”

“…D 'Ambrosio, 2006;Mosimege, 2017;Rosa & Orey, 2011). Yet, what appears new is an explicit turn towards ecology (Coles, 2022) and a de-centring of the human perspective. There is growing recognition − not new, but illuminated by the recent global health pandemic and extreme climate-related events − of a changing, precarious world and the need for mathematics education to account for its role and have a response.…”