Teacher Professional Learning with/in Place: Storying the Work of Decolonizing Mathematics Education from within a Colonial Structure

We come together, five mathematics teacher educators from varied cultural backgrounds and diverse academic pathways, interested in teacher professional learning, and interested in exploring our understanding of colonial practices in mathematics education specifically and in education more generally. In this paper, we share our stories, drawing upon our own experiences in conversation with each other and in dialogue with academic readings. Our paper studies tensions encountered as we explore decolonizing educational practices within colonial structures, paying close attention to place/land-based pedagogies. In recognizing education as a colonial act, we examine some of the literature in decolonizing education and research before introducing arguments for the role of mathematics education in colonizing educational practices. As a collaborative research group, we met regularly over a period of 3 months, collecting audio recordings of our meetings, transcriptions, shared individual writings, and written responses to each other’s writing and academic readings. We draw on narrative inquiry to structure our experiences of decolonizing mathematics teacher professional learning through living and telling stories and then through re-telling and re-living stories. We argue that this process is rewarding and challenging, and requires individual and collective ongoing dialogue. With our stories, we challenge the places where mathematics is performed, for example from classrooms to learning gardens, and what counts as mathematics. We conclude with questions to frame future directions and dialogues with an invitation to others to respond through critical dialogue and practice.