3412

Mark Boylan

philosophy of mathematics education

2017

32

Mathematics educators have begun to respond to current ecological, social and political crises by extending curriculum content. Whilst this is a necessary task for mathematics educators to engage in, it is not sufficient. I argue in this paper, that as well as the need for an ecologically informed curriculum, there is also a need for a critical relational pedagogy. I discuss relational knowing and being as a philosophical and theoretical basis for such a pedagogy, informed by an ethics of responsibility and the concept of ecological selves. The latter construct derives from problematising conceptions within ecological thinking and environmental ethics. I then propose a framework for developing ecological actors consisting of enchantment, emotionality, embodiment, ensemble and expansiveness, and exemplify these concepts' applicability to supporting ecological selves in mathematics classrooms.