Renderings of Loving Kindness: Dialogic Engagements in the Mathematics Classroom
Tasha Ann Ausman
Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies December 29, 2019 DOI: 10.25071/1916-4467.40425 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Qualitative study Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Population | The author's high school mathematics students, alongside the author's own journal entries |
| Interventions | Mindfulness practice of loving kindness dialogic approaches in teaching mathematics |
| Key findings | Argues that an emerging loving kindness pedagogy, pursued through dialogue and self-reflexive practices with high school mathematics students, begins to reveal the defences that shape psychic life in the mathematics classroom and opens possibilities for future learning. The author contends that conventional mathematics teaching, though rigorous, can be marked by tension, anxiety, and cruelty in the pursuit of elegant solutions. |
Abstract
I imagine mathematics to be a place of loving kindness and dialogue. In completing the above prompt for this Special Issue of JCACS, I invoke a fraught history of teaching and learning, drenched in contradictory feelings of love, hate, sadness and joy. Though pedagogically rigorous, many days in my classroom have been marked by tension, anxiety, and even cruelty, in the name of producing elegant, beautiful solutions to cleanly explicated problems. Determined to change these dynamics, I embarked on a recent journey with my high school mathematics students to cultivate a mindfulness practice of loving kindness by exploring new ways to engage in dialogue and open up possibilities for self-reflexivity. In this paper, I offer a rhetorical analysis (Felman, 1982) of my pen-and-ink graphical journal entries from past and present, alongside student drawings and reflection cards that were the result of new dialogic approaches in teaching mathematics. Through an emerging loving kindness pedagogy, this work begins to reveal the kinds of defences that fill the playground of psychic life unfolding in the mathematics classroom, as well as possibilities for future learning.