A conversation with Ogundimu on decolonization in academics and how it impacted his students’ understanding of mathematics, culture and technology
In 2022, the maths department at Durham launched a decolonization effort that was one of many initiatives aimed at making higher-education maths curricula more inclusive. Mathematicians involved in that and similar initiatives elsewhere explain how they are ushering in a new era of teaching and training for the next generation of mathematicians.
One of the things that makes mathematics a less diverse discipline is that it’s a combination of technology and mathematics. A survey conducted by the US National Science Foundation shows that no one identifying as American Indian or Alaskan Native received a doctorate in mathematics or statistics. Just 28 (1.5%) were awarded to Black or African American mathematicians or statisticians, and 33 (1.7%) to researchers who identify as belonging to more than one race.
“It’s always easy to not do the right thing because you’re too busy,” Parker says. He encourages mathematicians such as him to empathise with people who don’t hear people from their nation or culture.
The handbook will focus on three things: “what students are being taught, how it’s being taught and who is doing the teaching,” Ogundimu says. “What happens in other cultures? How does this impact how mathematics is communicated in general?” he asks. The new curriculum changes show students that there are many other people doing mathematics.
Using that approach, “we have respected the knowledge of Indigenous people and are furthering our ties with Indigenous people” while still teaching students core topics, he says. For example, when teaching statistics courses, Doolittle has discussed a simplified version of the Peach Stone Game, which is based on making wagers and is played in his community. He says that you can analyse this by the chance of two outcomes over time.
Indigenization efforts are something that I would like to encourage my colleagues to do.
He cautions that it isn’t a matter of grabbing an example and opening the book. A carefully planned process is required in order to do this authentically and ethically.
Sharing knowledge of ceremony without strong permission and ethical approval from the Indigenous community from which the example is drawn is inappropriate. By telling his students about the Peach Stone Game but not identical, Doolittle avoids sharing information that is meant to be kept under wraps.
If an example is written in a book, then we can use it. Always double-check with other sources that it is both an accurate and appropriate example.
Yong is urging other mathematicians to make human connections if they want to introduce mathematics examples from communities they don’t belong to. Otherwise, it’s appropriation all over again.
In 2019, when Yong began strategizing about indigenizing his pre-calculus course, he wanted to integrate examples from Polynesian ocean-navigation techniques. However, he and his immediate relatives “are not sea people”, he says. “My ancestors voyaged here — someone down the line was on a canoe, but not my parents or my cousins.”
His online pre- calculus textbook will eventually be free, as a result of the engagement he has had with various resources. To begin revamping his curriculum, he identified a few strong examples through online searches.
Creating the Future Africa AIMS Ghana (AIMS): Connecting Students with Vagabonds in the Outskirts of Africa
So, Yong engrossed himself in building connections with voyaging communities. He talked to people about his project as a volunteer. Their reception of his work was “overwhelmingly supportive”, he says.
The curriculum entices students to learn when instructors replace irrelevant examples with ones that they can see and experience. Although students might be more interested in mathematics from their own cultures, they can also benefit from engaging examples that are from other communities.
It was more than chance that enabled Tabiri to return to AIMS Ghana. To create the future Africa AIMS hopes for, the organization is utilizing a hybrid approach to recruiting talent.
The senior manager of outreach for AIMS in Cape Town, South Africa says that there are always a Pan-African cohort in each centre. Adotey was born and raised in Africa. Each centre hosts, on average, people from 15 African countries, studying and living together in a 24-hour learning environment, he says. “Students from the same country do not stay together — we mix them up.” Students are encouraged to leave their countries’ geopolitical differences at the door, Adotey says, an approach that fosters unity in the student body.
Other African mathematicians who’ve trained abroad often find that such job-market pressures stop them from returning. Low salaries are one big driver of that talent loss, Adotey notes. Job opportunities in home countries for African mathematicians are not as good as in other countries.
“It was great for me to have passed through AIMS and be back again to teach,” Tabiri says. She notes that when students see a woman of the same colour who trained at AIMS and earned a doctorate returning to work, it is encouraging. One-third of the AIMS alumni are women, and they believe they can also get a PhD.
AIMS also offers a degree program called a mini-MBA. Students who work at industry partners such as banks, software companies, development organizations or international research centers will be given internships that will last from three to six months. Learning experiences prepare people to work in industries like big data. And Adotey says that several industry partners have hired alumni as employees.
Too few women applied to the AIMS that’s why the scheme was founded. Girls are provided with free books, a laptop and internet access. “Some of them haven’t even seen computers,” Tabiri says. Academic and industry mathematicians work together to discuss how students can engage with research.
Each girl is paired with a mentor, and students visit AIMS Ghana during school breaks, with free meals and lodging, to attend mini courses on finance and physics. 35 girls attended from 11 regions in the first cohort of students. They graduated from the programme in November 2021. 21 people who have applied for university are doing science, technology, engineering and math courses.
Decolonizing Science in the Age of the Black Lives Matter Movement: Why white men shouldn’t be cited in statistics? An interview with Ogundimu
Questions like these have been important in science’s history, but not its teaching. Efforts to address them include books written by historians, such as George Joseph’s book The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics, and the ongoing series Science Across Cultures. The interest in decolonization has increased in many parts of the world. The debate on decolonizing mathematics is explored in the latest instalment of our series on decolonizing science.
The Black Lives Matter movement, which accelerated following the murder in 2020 of George Floyd by a police officer in the United States, moved “the whole agenda into the forefront in this system”, says Ogundimu, who hails from Nigeria and is of Black African descent. Three undergraduate interns have been selected to work on the decolonization project at Durham, according to a pool of students who applied. Those interns – Harini Pradeep, who is of South Asian descent, and Claire De-Korte and Leah Parry, who are both white – are an integral part of the project.
“These ideas go a long way for getting people engaged,” Ogundimu says. I don’t understand why someone would think that an example in statistics can’t come from ancient Egypt. He asked.
“Nobody says, ‘Middle-aged white men shouldn’t be cited.’ That is not the thing.” Instead, he asks, if these are the only people you have referenced in courses, then what can you do differently to include other people?
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00223-w
The Bakhshali Manuscript: a Numerical History of the Algebra of the Italian-American Mathematicians
The negative coverage shows “just how easy it is to misunderstand this message”, Crossman says. It is clear that the message needs to be broadcasted more. Because perhaps some people aren’t necessarily engaging in good faith with what we’re saying. But there’s an awful lot of other people who clearly just don’t quite understand yet where we’re coming from,” he notes.
Questions like those about social constructs of scientific knowledge remind me of a debate about how much scientific knowledge is socially constructed. What is known as pure mathematics is a case in point. Algebra, the method of representing problems in mathematical form, is often taught as a collection of rules to memorize and practise, described using abstract symbols such as x and y. It wasn’t always so.
Some rules for how to solve everyday mathematical problems would be contained in this manuscript. Among these are linear equations, quadratic equations and means of finding the square roots of numbers. Like Al-Khwārizmī, the unknown writer describes equations using words.
The mathematicians from Europe, particularly the young man named Fibonacci, who was born in Italy in 1170), were able to expand their geographical reach by presenting these ideas in Latin. The concept of numerals in Arabic was one of the main concepts that helped to introduce Europe. Because many original Arabic texts (including Al-Khwārizmī’s algebra book) were later lost, many ideas that originated in the Middle East later found their way back to the region through translations of these Latin texts.
Al-Khwārizmī refers to Indian numerals to acknowledge earlier sources for his methods. The only surviving example of a potential source of this type is the Bakhshali manuscript, a collection of some 70 ‘pages’ of mathematics written on birch-tree bark in a form of Sanskrit. The manuscript has been dated to as early as the third or fourth century ad and is now stored at the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford, UK. The text uses a concept of zero that is known as the oldest surviving text. Arabic numbers use a dot to indicate zero.