Abstract
Oppressive learning experiences affect most school children, such as Tsiggano, who belong in marginalized groups due to the dominance of stereotypic identities concerning ethnicity, class or gender. At the same time, hegemonic discourses construct mathematics as an essentialist body of knowledge that tends to capture human learning development in linear and static terms. Taking into account that essentialist approaches to both Tsiggano learner-identity and mathematical knowledge-identity are still prevalent as part of curricula practices, the present study attempts to open up an alternative politics of possibility. Specifically, by means of discussing two ethnographic teaching experiments as performative acts, the aim is to explore the possibility of breaking dominant discursive narratives of learning identities in the mathematics classroom. The first teaching experiment involves the performing of school arithmetic based on selling–buying word problems by Maria, Giannoula, and Sofia, and the second performs the teaching of basics in school arithmetic in Romani -the mother tongue of Panagiotis.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Tsigganoi (τσιγγάνοι) is the name most commonly used in Greece and in continental Europe (e.g. Cigány in Hungary, Cigano in Portuguese, or Zingari in Italian) for Romani people, also known as Roma, Gypsies or Travelers (see Wikipedia; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_Romani_people). Today the term Romani or Roma is formally used in most organizations including the United Nations and the Council of Europe. For this paper, the term Tsiggano is mostly used, interchangeably with Gypsy and Roma, in order to reflect how people in the community still refer to themselves. However, the term Gypsy (Γύϕτος) – although avoided as it has a derogatory sense in Greek) – has not disappeared and the emerging term Roma is used hesitantly due to its emphasis on creating a common identity amongst diverse communities in Europe. A related term is Chicano or Xicano. It is used in American-English language and context, and although it seems related, it refers to American-born people of Mexican decent and is associated with the striving of the Chicano movement in the late 1960s for social, economic and political equality (see Armando Navarro, 1974).
- 2.
For more details concerning the methodology in each one of the teaching experiments one needs to refer to Chronaki (2004) for the cases of Maria, Giannoula and Sofia, and to Chronaki (2008) for the case of Panagiotis.
- 3.
Gramsci originally coined the term ‘subaltern’ in order to address the economically dispossessed. Currently, Ranajit Guha has reappropriated Gramsci’s term in an effort to locate and re-establish a voice or collective locus of agency in post-colonial India. In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Spivak acknowledges the importance of understanding the ‘subaltern’ standpoint but also criticizes the efforts of certain subaltern studies’ emphasis towards creating a ‘collective voice’ through Westernized mediating practices. Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” was originally published in Nelson and Grossberg (1988).
References
Arendt, H. (1958/1988). The human condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bakhtin, M. (1979/1986). Speech genres and other late essays. (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Eds., V. McGee, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.
Bauchspies, W. (2005). Sharing shoes and counting years: Mathematics, colonialisation and communication. In A. Chronaki & I. M. Christiansen (Eds.) Challenging perspectives on mathematics classroom communication (pp. 237–260). Connecticut: IAP press.
Boucher, G. (2006). The politics of performativity: A critique of Judith Butler. Parrhesia, 1, 112–141.
Butler, J. P. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution: An essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–531.
Butler, J. P. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. P. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of ‘sex’. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. P. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. London and New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. P., & Spivak, G. C. (2007) Who sings the Nation-State?: Language, politics, belonging. Calcutta and New York: Seagull Books.
Chronaki, A. (2003). Developing mathematical learning as mastering new tools and entering new discourses: Some thoughts on a very complex process. Paper presented in the EARLI (European Association of Research in Learning and Instruction). August 2003, Padova, Italy.
Chronaki, A. (2005). Learning about ‘learning identities’ in the school arithmetic practice: The experience of two young minority Gypsy girls in the Greek context of education. European Journal of Psychology of Education: Special Issue on “The Social Mediation of Learning in Multiethnic Classrooms”, 20(1), 61–74.
Chronaki, A. (2008a). An entry to dialogicality in the maths classrooms: Encouraging hybrid learning identities. In M. Cesar & K. Kumpulainen (Eds.), Social interactions in multicultural settings (pp. 117–145). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Chronaki, A. (2008b). Mathematics, technologies, education: The gender perspective. Volos: University of Thessaly Press.
Chronaki, A. (2010). Revisiting mathemacy: A process-reading of critical mathematics education. In H. Alro, O. Ravn, & P. Valero (Eds.), Critical mathematics education: Past, present and future (pp. 31–50). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Clifford, J. (2000). Routes: Travel and translation in the late twentieth century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dafermos, M. (2006). Marginalisation and Educational Inclusion. Athens: Atrapos.
Damarin, S. (2000). The mathematically able as a marked category. Gender and Education, 12(1), 69–85.
Denzin, N. K. (2003). Performance ethnography: Critical pedagogy and the politics of culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Diamond, E. (1996). Introduction. In E. Diamond (Ed.), Performance and cultural politics. New York: Routledge.
Diawara, M. (1996). Black studies, cultural studies: Performative acts. In J. Storey (Ed.), What is cultural studies? A reader (pp. 300–306). London: Arnold.
Hall, S., & du Gay, P. (Eds.). (1996). Questions of cultural identity. London: Sage Publications.
Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™. New York: Routledge.
Hedegaard, M., & Chaiklin, S. (2005). Radical-local teaching and learning: A cultural-historical approach. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.
Hitchcock, P. (1992). Dialogics of the oppressed. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Kamberelis, G. (2001). Producing heteroglossic classroom (Micro)cultures through hybrid discourse practice. Linguistics and Education, 12(1), 85–125.
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge.
Madison, D. S. (1998). Performances, personal narratives, and the politics of possibility. In S. J. Dailey (Ed.), The future of performance studies: Visions and revisions. Washington, DC: National Communication Association.
Matusov, E. (2004). Bakhtin’s dialogic pedagogy (Guest Editor’s Introduction). Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 42(6), 3–11.
Matusov, E. (2009). Pedagogical chronotopes of monologic conventional classrooms: ontology and didactics. In Journey into Dialogic Pedagogy. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Publishers.
McNay, L. (1999). Subject, psyche and agency: The work of Judith Butler. Theory, Culture, Society, 16(2): 175–193.
McNay, L. (2000). Gender and agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in feminist and social theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Mimica, J. (1988). Intimations of infinity: The mythopoeia of the Iqwaye counting system and number, Oxford, New York and Hamburg: Berg.
Navarro, A. (1974). The evolution of Chicano politics in Aztlan. Chicano Journal of Social Sciences and the Arts, 5, 72.
Nelson, C., & Grossberg, L. (Eds.). (1988). Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271–313). London: Macmillan.
Nunes, T. (1997). Systems of signs and mathematical reasoning. In T. Nunes & P. Bryant (Eds.), Learning and teaching mathematics: An international perspective. Oxford: Psychology Press/ Taylor and Francis.
Okely, J. (1983). Changing cultures: The traveller-gypsies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Okely, J. (1997). Some political consequences of theories of gypsy ethnicity: The place of the intellectual. In A. James, J. Hokney, & A. Dowson (Eds.), After writing culture: Epistemology and Praxis in contemporary anthropology. London: Routledge.
Pereen, E. (2007). Intersubjectivities and popular culture: Bakhtin and beyond. Stanford. Stanford University Press.
Pollock, D. (1998). Performing writing. In P. Phelan & J. Lane (Eds.), The ends of performance. New York: New York University Press.
Restivo, S. (1991). Mathematics in society and history: Sociological inquiries. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Said, E. (1978). Orientalism: Western conceptions of the orient. London: Penguin Press.
Schechner, R. (1985). Between theater and anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.
Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.) Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271-313). Urbana/Chicago: University of Illinois Press
Walkerdine, V. (1988). The mastery of reason: Cognitive Development and the production of rationality. London: Routledge.
Young, R. J. C. (2001). Postcolonialism: An historical introduction (1st ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Acknowledgments
The present chapter is based on a meta-analysis of previous studies. I would like to thank all students, teachers, and student-teachers who have enabled this study in a wide variety of ways. At the same time I would like to thank three very close colleagues Manolis Dafermos, Panagiotis Kanellopoulos, and Michalis Kontopodis for their support, strength, and inspiration towards a better way of living in academia.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chronaki, A. (2011). “Troubling” Essentialist Identities: Performative Mathematics and the Politics of Possibility. In: Kontopodis, M., Wulf, C., Fichtner, B. (eds) Children, Development and Education. International perspectives on early childhood education and development, vol 3. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0243-1_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0243-1_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-0242-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-0243-1
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)