First Peoples living in remote Australia are educated in two worlds. The future of bush food enterprises in outstations in Utopia depends on the successful transfer of intergenerational knowledge. High school girls respectfully inquire about how to harvest and process important cultural materials from country. Students, senior women and young men strengthen their connections to self, kinship and culture and share responsibility to care for country. Careful collaboration with First Nations people creates opportunities to provide mathematics education which complements and is informed by the work that already exists in the local school community. Consultation with assistant teachers, students, and other community members creates opportunities to validate Indigenous pedagogies in mathematics education. Decolonising Mathematics Education explores and responds to student interest in managing and harvesting akatyerr (desert raisin). Transforming pedagogy enables the students to respond more broadly to the needs of Utopia Eastern Anmatyerr and Alyawarr people to price and sell this important bush food. Income generated from the enterprise is modest, however the skills of a small start-up business have been applied to many learning opportunities that exist in the local community.

This volume showcases new insights, teaching ideas and new and unique ways of applying critical mathematics education, in areas as diverse as climate change, obesity, decolonisation and ethnomathematics.

Mathematics is traditionally seen as the most neutral of disciplines, the furthest removed from the arguments and controversy of politics and social life. However, critical mathematics challenges these assumptions and actively attacks the idea that mathematics is pure, objective, and value?neutral. It argues that history, society, and politics have shaped mathematics—not only through its applications and uses but also through molding its concepts, methods, and even mathematical truth and proof, the very means of establishing truth. Critical mathematics education also attacks the neutrality of the teaching and learning of mathematics, showing how these are value?laden activities indissolubly linked to social and political life. Instead, it argues that the values of openness, dialogicality, criticality towards received opinion, empowerment of the learner, and social/political engagement and citizenship are necessary dimensions of the teaching and learning of mathematics, if it is to contribute towards democracy and social justice. This book draws together critical theoretic contributions on mathematics and mathematics education from leading researchers in the field. Recurring themes include: The natures of mathematics and critical mathematics education, issues of epistemology and ethics; Ideology, the hegemony of mathematics, ethnomathematics, and real?life education; Capitalism, globalization, politics, social class, habitus, citizenship and equity. The book demonstrates the links between these themes and the discipline of mathematics, and its critical teaching and learning. The outcome is a groundbreaking collection unified by a shared concern with critical perspectives of mathematics and education, and of the ways they impact on practice.

Positing the notions of coloniality of ignorance and geopolitics of ignorance as central to coloniality and colonisation, this book examines how colonialists socially produced ignorance among colonised indigenous peoples so as to render them docile and manageable. Dismissing colonial descriptions of indigenous people as savages, illiterate, irrational, prelogical, mystical, primitive, barbaric and backward, the book argues that imperialists/colonialists contrived geopolitics of ignorance wherein indigenous regions were forced to become ignorant, hence containable and manageable in the imperial world. Questioning the provenance of modernist epistemologies, the book asks why Eurocentric scholars only contest the provenance of indigenous knowledges, artefacts and scientific collections. Interrogating why empire sponsors the decolonisation of universities/epistemologies in indigenous territories while resisting the repatriation/restitution of indigenous artefacts, the book also wonders why Westerners who still retain indigenous artefacts, skulls and skeletons in their museums, universities and private collections do not consider such artefacts and skulls to be colonising them as well. The book is valuable to scholars and activists in the fields of anthropology, museums and heritage studies, science and technology studies, decoloniality, policymaking, education, politics, sociology and development studies.

This book offers new theoretical ground for thinking about, and transforming, leadership and higher education worldwide. Through an examination of the construct of intimacy and ‘nearness’, including emotional, spiritual, psychic, intellectual, and physical closeness, Jonathan Jansen demonstrates its power to influence positive leadership in young people. He argues that sensory leadership, which includes but extends beyond the power of touch, represents a fresh and effective approach to progressive transformation of long divided institutions. Considering richly textured narratives, chapters explore complex intimacies among Black and White university students in South Africa, post-apartheid and in the aftermath of a major racial atrocity. The stories reveal the students’ transformation in the process of ‘leadership for change’, interweaving concepts of racism, human relationships and intimacy, and in turn expanding the knowledge base of social and institutional improvement. This book explores how, when different kinds of nearness come together in leadership change, young people respond in ways that would not be possible through conventional instruments such as policy, legislation and the appeal to moral sensibilities alone. Leading for Change will be critical reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of education, educational justice, higher education, educational leadership and change, social and/or racial justice. This book will also be of interest to those working in the fields of anthropology, social psychology, and South African contemporary politics, policy and institutional practices.

Living Culturally Responsive Mathematics Education with/in Indigenous Communities explores challenges and possibilities across international contexts, involving Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, teachers and Elders responding to calls for improved education for all Indigenous students. Authors from Australia, New Zealand, United States, Micronesia, and Canada explore the nature of culturally responsive mathematics education. Chapters highlight the importance of relationships with communities and the land, each engaging critically with ideas of culturally responsive education, exploring what this stance might mean and how it is lived in local contexts within global conversations. Education researchers and teacher educators will find a living pathway where scholars, educators, youth and community members critically take-up culturally responsive teachings and the possibilities and challenges that arise along the journey. Contributors are: Dayle Anderson, Dora Andre-Ihrke, Jo-ann Archibald Q'um Q'um Xiiem, Maria Jose Athie-Martinez, Robin Averill, Trevor Bills, Beatriz A. Camacho, A. J. (Sandy) Dawson, Dwayne Donald, Herewini Easton, Tauvela Fale, Amanda Fritzlan, Florence Glanfield, Jodie Hunter, Roberta Hunter, Newell Margaret Johnson, Julie Kaomea, Robyn Jorgensen, Jerry Lipka, Lisa Lunney Borden, Dora Miura, Sharon Nelson-Barber, Cynthia Nicol, Gladys Sterenberg, Marama Taiwhati, Pania Te Maro, Jennifer S. Thom, David Wagner, Evelyn Yanez, and Joanne Yovanovich.

Drawing on treaties, international law, the work of other Indigenous scholars, and especially personal experiences, Marie Battiste documents the nature of Eurocentric models of education, and their devastating impacts on Indigenous knowledge. Chronicling the negative consequences of forced assimilation, racism inherent to colonial systems of education, and the failure of current educational policies for Aboriginal populations, Battiste proposes a new model of education, arguing the preservation of Aboriginal knowledge is an Aboriginal right. Central to this process is the repositioning of Indigenous humanities, sciences, and languages as vital fields of knowledge, revitalizing a knowledge system which incorporates both Indigenous and Eurocentric thinking.