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Disrupting ‘Development’ as the Quality/Equity Discourse: Cyborgs and Subalterns in School Technoscience

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Mapping Equity and Quality in Mathematics Education

Abstract

Discourses of ‘development’ as the achievement of rationality are still predominant in current curricula reforms in education. Specifically, in mathematics education, technology-mediated teaching is assumed a means for development towards progressive policies for inclusion in both metropolitan (e.g. NCTM in US, 2000), and peripheral localities (e.g. DEPPS in Greece, 2003). Such curricula reforms have been largely rooted in pedagogical agendas for quality/equity (mathematics) education that aim to foster simultaneously self and society development in the realm of a ‘new’ information age. Despite high expectations, technology and mathematics are still peripheral options for most females when they consider further studying or career up growth. The present paper discusses the potential for an alternative theorising of female relation to school technoscience such as technology and mathematics-related literacies. Based on a preliminary analysis of interview data the constructs of ‘cyborg’ and ‘subaltern’ are introduced as ways of disrupting stereotypic readings of a partial relation to technoscience as negative, passive or, even, dangerous.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to Wikipedia ‘Technoscience is a concept widely used in the interdisciplinary community of science and technology studies to designate the technological and social context of science. The notion indicates a common recognition that scientific knowledge is not only socially coded and historically situated but sustained and made durable by material (non-human) networks’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technoscience).

  2. 2.

    The notion of ‘a constructivist perspective’ is used, here, in an excessive way, but one needs to keep in mind that more than one constructivist perspectives have been formed within the field of (mathematics) education, such as interactive, dialectic, radical, social etc. (Chronaki 1992, 1997).

  3. 3.

    In a similar vein, one needs to mention diversification across a variety of socio-cultural perspectives ranging the emphasis from psychological to cultural, anthropological and critical approaches to learning and communicating (Kontopodis et al., in press).

  4. 4.

    Cyborg, short for cybernetic organism, is a term coined by the research scientists Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in the ‘60s as they tried to imagine the kind of augmented man that would be necessary for extra-terrestrial exploration or space flight. It refers most particularly to an imagined and actual mix of machine and organism so as to constitute an integrated information circuit. […] The first cyborg, from Clynes and Kline’s lab was a white lab-rat with an osmotic pump implanted to allow the researchers to inject chemicals to control and observe aspects of the rat’s physiology. […]. Donna Haraway has taken cyborg as a metaphor to draw together an array of critical questions about human-machine relations and varied embodied forms of technoscience as part of socialist feminism. Recently, the cyborg had emerged as a figure in popular culture and especially in science fiction (Clynes and Kline 1960; Haraway 1991).

  5. 5.

    Gramsci has originally coined the term ‘subaltern’ in order to address the economically dispossessed, and today Ranajit Guha reappropriates Gramsci’s term in an effort to locate and re-establish a voice or collective locus of agency in postcolonial India. In her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Spivak acknowledges the importance of understanding the ‘subaltern’ standpoint but also criticises the efforts of certain subaltern studies emphasis towards creating a ‘collective voice’ through westernised mediating practices.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Human Sciences, Department of Early Childhood Education, University of Thessaly, Argonafton & Filellinon Street, 38221, Volos, Greece

    Anna Chronaki

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  1. Anna Chronaki
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Correspondence to Anna Chronaki .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Curtin University of Technology, Perth, West Australia, Australia

    Bill Atweh

  2. University of the Witwatersrand, Witwatersrand, 2050, South Africa

    Mellony Graven

  3. College of Arts and Science, University, Miami, 45056, USA

    Walter Secada

  4. Dept. Education, Learning &, Philosophy, Aalborg University, Fibigerstraede 10, Aalborg, 9220, Denmark

    Paola Valero

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Chronaki, A. (2010). Disrupting ‘Development’ as the Quality/Equity Discourse: Cyborgs and Subalterns in School Technoscience. In: Atweh, B., Graven, M., Secada, W., Valero, P. (eds) Mapping Equity and Quality in Mathematics Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9803-0_1

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