Week 3 Blog Post

Last year I attended a block course in Auckland for part of my MST training. We had a session facilitated by Louise Fitzgerald who was completing her PHD with a research lens on teaching for social justice which in essence, is about connecting the social sciences into mathematics. This teaching approach is about allowing your students time and an opportunity to see how issues and problems within their communities came to be, rather than reinforcing stereotypes for example, such as racial discrimination. After allowing your students time to consider these issues and problems, mathematizing the issue and engaging in mathematical modelling can be a beginning point for taking further action with these community-based problems. 

When I relate this pedagogical approach to my own educational story, and my recent learnings of narrative identity, power, marginalized groups and conscientization, I remind myself about the vast and varied toolkit that teachers need to have. If my students are motivated and engaged with both the learning and contexts of learning, can this only be advantageous for their futures? A dominant narrative (McAdams, 2011) is that societal issues and problems can be addressed… but by whom is the question I am puzzled with today.

For much of my early life I lived in what Freire (1974) calls a magical consciousness, believing that the world I saw in front of me was a true representation of the world as a whole. Conversations, research and learning tasks of sort, exposed me to some of the realities of other parts of the world but I believed that the rest of Aotearoa was the same as, or close to, my immediate surroundings. This narrative was normalised because it was the story I could see, every day and became so ingrained that it seemed perfectly natural (McAdams, 2011). 

I enrolled at University with an interest-free student loan and believed at the time that anyone else who wanted to do this had the opportunity at their feet.  I didn’t think about the larger part of society that wasn’t represented in my lectures or on campus. I didn’t consider the marginalized groups of students that I didn’t see, talk to, interact with or hear their stories from. Both the dominant narrative and my magical consciousness told me that tertiary study was achievable for everyone and that everyone had an equal opportunity to access education in Aotearoa! How naive was I?

As I progressed through my career as a teacher and worked in a variety of schools and communities, I started to notice the different aspects of our society. I started to question the dominant narrative that there was equitable access to education in New Zealand. I started to recognise and understand the significant barriers that people face when it comes to education. My critical consciousness (Freire, 1974) started to develop, and I wondered just what it was that I could do to be transformational. This conscientization started me on the journey of reflecting on the marginalised communities in our society and how as an educator I can be part of the transformation process to unveil a “pedagogy of all people in the process of permanent liberation” (Freire, 1974, pg. 54.).

References:

Bright, N., & Webber, M. (2024). Poipoia ngā tamariki: How whānau and teachers support tamariki Māori to be successful in learning and education. NZCER.

Freire, Paulo, 1921-1997. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York :Continuum.

McAdams, D. P. (2011). Narrative identity. In S. J. Schwartz, K. Luyckx, & V. L. Vignoles (Eds.), Handbook of identity theory and research (pp. 99–115). Springer Science + Business Media.

Ministry of Education. (2023). Tertiary achievement and attainment. Education Counts.