This Is Personal: Coming to Know (Self) with Indigenous Ways of Knowing Mathematics

Source abstract

I invite you to share in parts of the journey I undertook as a non-Indigenous education PhD student working in an Indigenous mathematics education research space and how this process resulted in transformative shifts in researcher subjectivity within the research context. I will consider how this self is transformed in relation to Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing as a way of responding to the imperative of culturally responsive pedagogies (CRP) to disrupt knowledge hierarchies. Specifically, this work explores possibilities of reconstituting political space within Indigenous mathematics education contexts via Indigenist methods of researcher critical reflexivity. While considering how such an approach has implications for mathematics educators, I extend ways of conceptualising social justice in mathematics education discourses. Moments are explicated from within the researcher’s experience along a river that traverses the years of my scholarly journey, running alongside and through many disparate but connected parts of my experience.