MATHEMATICS EDUCATION AS AN ACCULTURATION PROCESS:
THE CASE OF A ROMANY STUDENT GROUP IN GREECE
Stathopoulou Charoula
Secondary Education/ University of Aegean
stath@rhodes.aegean.gr
Abstract
The literature provides us with an open dialogue on whether
mathematical education is a process of enculturation or acculturation. Bishop
(Bishop, 2002) in “Mathematical acculturation, cultural conflicts, and
transition” talks about an acculturation perspective on mathematical
education, as every student experiences a conflict in this process. Here, we
will also support the argument that whenever we refer to students from
minority and marginal groups, we can only talk about an acculturation
process.
More specifically we will examine the phenomenon of school failure
of a Romany group of students in a Greek school in Athens, in relation to
their cultural particularities and the cultural conflicts that occur within the
school as well as in the classroom. Apart from that we expand the argument
of how these cultural conflicts are connected with equivalent cognitive
conflicts and how they influence the learning of mathematics.
For the purposes of this project we relied on ethnographic material,
which was the product of a research project done in a Romany class.
Romany students seem to meet the first conflicts when coming into contact
with the whole school situation, in its material and symbolic dimensions.
The conflicts continue into the school classroom and are extended to
cognitive conflicts as students try to balance two different cultures -- two
different identities.
For the realization of the rhetorical aim of the society for
egalitarianism we consider it essential that the cultural particularities of the
different groups are taken into consideration when mathematical education
and education in general are being structured.
Introduction
Since we, as educators of mathematics, have moved towards teaching
and research approaches that take into consideration cultural factors in the
teaching/learning of mathematics, many relevant issues have arisen.
Minority students’ processes of reconciling themselves to schooling, and
their subsequent difficulties in coping with formal education/mathematics
education, are one of these issues.
In this presentation we are going to discuss the case of a Romany
student group regarding the cultural and cognitive conflicts they confront in
education generally, and mostly in mathematics education. We point out that
for Romany students this process is definitely an acculturation one.
For the purposes of this project we relied on ethnographical material,
which was the product of a research study on the spot. The research was
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conducted in the region of Zefyri, in Athens, during a school year in a ‘pure’
Romany class which, despite being the first grade, had the peculiarity of
consisting of students from the age of 7-12 years old.
Theoretical points
In the general discussion concerning the nature of mathematics
education in a cultural perspective, it is described sometimes as an
enculturation process and sometimes as acculturation.
The term ‘acculturation’ has appeared in anthropology since 1930. At
this time anthropological concerns shifted from the study of Indian villages
to 'community studies'. These studies concerned the problems of minority
and immigrant groups moving to towns and cities. Anthropological research
at this time focused on these groups' efforts to be culturally as well
economically integrated in the greater American society. So the term is used
to describe the process of 'modification of one culture through continuous
contact with another' (Wolcott (1974).
In contrast to this term is the term 'enculturation', for the description of
'the induction, by the cultural group, of young people into their culture'. Alan
Bishop (1988) in his book Mathematical enculturation: a cultural
perspective on mathematics education has focused on this notion. As he
himself later notes about his book: "cultural conflict was not specifically
addressed, although the ideas of cultural difference and similarity played a
great role in the first part of the analysis, where different mathematical
knowledge and cultural values were analysed" (Bishop, 1994).
After the collapse of the myth of the 'culture-free' nature of mathematics
the research went on to explain and interpret phenomena of mathematics
education mostly regarding students with cultural diversity. So, if the notion
of mathematics considered culture-free cognition implies a cultural
consonance, in contrast the assumption that mathematics is a culturally
bound subject implies a cultural dissonance when we speak about formal
education.
Alan Bishop (1994) in Cultural conflicts in mathematics education:
developing a research agenda, expresses the assumption that "all formal
education is a process of cultural interaction, and that every child
experiences some degree of cultural interaction in that process". More
recently, advancing these assumptions through his contribution to the book
Transitions between contexts of mathematical practices Bishop (2002)
speaks about all mathematics education as “a process of acculturation, and
that every learner experiences cultural conflict in that process” maintaining
also that cultural conflict could not only have a negative dimension.
In this work among several authors' views, Moscovici's are also
referred to: "Let us repeat that conflict is a necessary condition of influence.
It is the starting point and the means for changing others, of establishing new
relations or consolidating old ones. Uncertainty and ambiguity are concepts
and states derived from conflict" (p. 105). Bishop commenting on this state
notes that through his experience: "I have not met a single teacher who has
admitted to intentionally putting their students in a cultural conflict situation.
Among the reasons might be cultural sensitivity, or political correctness, but
another reason reflects an awareness that as well as having a cognitive
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component, cultural conflict involves strong emotional and affective
responses. Where cognitive conflict generates a cognitive response, the
cultural conflict situation generates a cultural response, which is more than
cognitive in character. Accepting this view, a corollary might be that cultural
conflict situations should demand a sympathetic and understanding response
from the teacher and peers. The teacher should be thinking less about
creating conflict, as this will naturally occur, but perhaps much more about
aspects of conflict resolution".
Sometimes what happens at school is something more than what is
obvious. Teachers generally do not consider at all cultural diversity,
especially when the subject is mathematics. Unfortunately for the majority
of teachers the only accepted mathematics is schooled, formal, mathematics.
So because there is no other kind of mathematics except that, there is no
conflict. What we are saying is that teachers don’t intentionally cause
conflicts because they ignore a part of mathematical cognition, which
students acquire informally. Teachers with these viewpoints can do very
little to improve the mathematics cognition of every cultural group.
In contrast, teachers who do consider the cultural dimension of
mathematics and treat the diversity with respect generally, and especially in
mathematics, must be more concerned about conflicts in the school context.
We do not think that this is a matter of how we could resolve all of the
conflicts that arise. Some of them however could be avoided if we take into
consideration the students’ cultures and modify the content and the ways of
teaching.
In order to contribute to this argumentation about the nature of
education/mathematics education, we are going to speak about our
experiences through our research with Romany students. We are going to
support the notion that regarding this cultural group, education as well as
mathematics education is an acculturation process, by analysing cultural and
cognitive parameters.
Among the main issues that are examined are:
How does the cultural background of Romany students relate to
cultural conflicts at school?
How do these cultural conflicts relate to cognitive ones?
Are there difficulties that are derived from the learning style of
Romany students?
What are the consequences for these students in the school
community and in the greater society?
The class and the community
Our study group was a Romany class, from Zephyri, a marginal
multicultural district of Athens, Greece. The research was based on their
community of origin. What is presented here is a part of a study, which was
the research for a Ph.D. dissertation, with supervisor Professor Kalabasis, in
the Aegean University. The title is: "The Connection between Cultural
Context and Teaching/Learning of Mathematics: An Ethnographic Study of
a Class of Romany Students and of their Community of Origin".
This class that was studied had the peculiarity to consist of students
from 7-12 years old. The number of students, at the beginning of the school
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year was about thirty. During the first trimester this number was different
every day. Only after Christmas holidays did it stabilize at about ten
students. One of the main reasons for students' inconsistency in attendance is
their semi-nomadic way of living, mostly for business purposes. Apart from
this particularity that is related to conflicts in the school context there is their
socio-economical organization, which is another source of conflict in the
formal education.
Their way of life and their views regarding education are in contrast
with greater society’s views. For the greater society formal education has
high status, and consistency in school attendance is assumed. In the Romany
community formal education is a questionable matter: a lot of Romany
people very often consider that they can teach their children what is needed
by themselves, through their involvement in the family business.
Thus for Romany people school, in the best case scenario, is only a part
of the education they consider necessary for their children. In their
community, by interacting -- using a horizontal way of teaching—they
acquire an important corpus of cognition/ mathematical cognition, through
particular practices. They do not care about cognition, which they do not
need directly, as well as about generalization. As Vasileiadou (1998) notices:
"theory for them is unknown and useless,…. Romany people don’t develop
cognition by posing questions but by experiencing answers".
The other important cultural particularity that is connected with
conflicts at school is their mother tongue. Difficulties that bi-lingual students
have at school have been analyzed extensively, but here we have an extra
particularity. Romany students do not only have Greek language--the formal
language in formal education-- as second one but furthermore, they have a
first language that is not a written one. Thus students come to school without
being familiar with any written code. Here we must note that this language
orality has not only negative consequences but it has also positive ones. Due
to this, for example, a Romany child is used to memorizing a lot of
information such as a list for shopping, and acquiring ease in doing mental
calculations, through working with his family.
Cultural and cognitive conflicts in the school and in the classroom
Clothing is one of the main elements of Romany peoples' identity. The
majority of Romany girls leave their way of clothing outside school in an
effort to be accepted by the teacher and by the non-Romany students.
Through our observations in their community it was obvious that they feel
more comfortable with their traditional clothing, as we notice that coming
home from school they changed into these clothes. In the school context
Romany girls have to balance two different identities. On the one hand they
have to support their main identity as members of their community of origin
and on the other hand they have to behave similarly to non-Romany
students, whose acceptance they showed that they needed. The kind of
clothing at least for girls was for them the source of one of the first cultural
conflicts.
Another cultural conflict is due to the school place itself. At this point I
would like to speak about an experience I had during a break. There were
two Romany boys, about ten years old, on their bicycles and just outside the
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schoolyard. After a short discussion, I asked them 'why they did not come to
school'. The two boys in an evident detestation pointed to the enclosure,
saying: "Don’t you see how they are!!!".
This experience provoked the exploration of the following questions:
What does the school place mean pedagogically?
What are its incompatibilities for Romany students?,
What are the likely conflicts caused by this?
Speaking about the role of the place, Solomon (1992), argues that the
arrangement of places that are selected, mainly regarding institutional
buildings, provide information about the social and institutional
arrangements that society wishes to introduce and maintain. In Greece the
school place is an object of such an arrangement, as it is determined by the
corresponding legislation and underlies the related control.
The configuration of an institutional building affects the every-day inner
institutional relations. The arrangements of the place, their connections and
which places have priority make obvious the intention of the state about the
school place and the consequent pedagogical attitudes.
In this way the state contributes to one kind of authority -- of school
authority. Speaking about school authority we could not just subsume it
under the state's authority, although the state wields the central control, but
we must expand it in the way Foucault uses the notion, as: “something which
is everywhere not because it includes everything but because it comes from
everywhere”. According to Foucault “authority is neither an institution nor a
structure, it isn’t also a power that some people occupy: it is the name we
give to a complex strategic situation in a given society”.
School authority dictates school discipline. School discipline through
several mechanisms of place, methods and techniques that compose it
analyzes, adjusts and formalizes children that are assigned to the school
institution and in this way characterizes, resolutely, the way school authority
is wielded. As Solomon notices: "(school authority) set always in action, in
every day and material level, systems of micro-authority that favour the
inequality and asymmetry as well as mechanisms that provide the obedience
of forces and of bodies too".
The way the external place of the school is shaped, with very high bars
and a wrought iron gate, and the strict land planning, is a reason for Romany
students to experience a crucial cultural conflict, as we saw characteristically
in the case of the two Romany non-student boys. In their community there
are no clear boarders between their houses; we either speak about barracks,
or about modern houses, perhaps as a reminder of the time they were
segregated nomads. Furthermore, the strict discipline with which the school
place is related is one more source of conflict for Romany students, as it too
doesn't characterize their culture.
The strict land planning is continued also in the classrooms. Inside the
classroom, desks were in well-ordered lines so that the students could view
the blackboard and the teacher's desk too. This particular ‘land planning’ if it
does not dictate them, at least it is related to, the resulting pedagogical and
didactical practices. The stability in this land planning -- noted in Greek
schools since the previous century -- is related to stereotypical practices. The
students work individually, any kind of collaboration is discouraged and the
teacher is the person that carries the knowledge speaking from his desk or
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writing on the board.
The teacher standing in his position can oversee the class, and the
students learn exclusively through his teaching and not by any interaction
among themselves. This formalized arrangement in the classrooms reflects
the formalization in didactic practices. It is related to the choices about the
teacher being at the center of the teaching and where students have limited
abilities of self-activity.
The fact of this strict land planning, and the perception that every place
services different needs, and also the teaching style, were sources of
conflicts for the majority of the Romany students. In their community they
are used to working in the open air and to living at houses with a unified
place for every activity and use like eating, sleeping, hosting. However, the
rigor of the school place did not restrain at all some disruptions. Very often
the students used their desks to sleep on, or left their places during lesson
time to be involved in fights with their classmates. After a lot of teachers'
remarks, the students either adapted to the classrooms norms or they dropped
out of school.
Also the way of teaching provoked cultural and as well cognitive
conflicts. In their community they acquired cultural cognition through their
involvement in their family business, in a horizontal way, collaborating with
members of their families. Furthermore, in this process students could invent
their own algorithm -- any algorithm that could lead to a viable solution. In
contrast, in the school context, students had to use strategies and practices
accepted by the teacher, who followed the school curriculum as well as the
school textbooks.
The teacher, following strictly the content of textbook, tried to teach
students to use formal ways to express mathematical notions and operations.
Very often the teacher was more interested in the correct use of the symbols
than in the understanding of the notions. For example, in the lesson where
students had to learn the use of inequality symbols, the teacher focused
exclusively on "the symbol the students ought to put" instead of the notion
of inequality. So the students, although they had learnt the order of the
numbers through their everyday experiences, were inefficient according to
teachers' expectations. The students generally, although they were efficient
in solving a wide range of oral problems, inventing and using their own
algorithms, had difficulties expressing their solutions in a written way -- in
the formal way.
Another cultural as well as cognitive conflict which we are going to
refer to concerns space -- it concerns the diverse way Romany people and
the greater Greek society conceptualize the notion of space. We noted that
the members of this community, through a different way of life -- different
environmental and cultural situations -- in comparison with that of the
greater society, modulated a different perception of space. It is indicative
that in Roma, their language, prepositions that determine space are much
fewer than the corresponding Greek ones. Very often for four or five
prepositions that describe different spatial situations in the Greek language,
there is only one corresponding term in their own tongue. For example, for
the Greek words: kato (down), apo kato (underneath), hamila (low), katagis
(on the ground) there is only one Roma word: tele.
Also in their tongue there are no words that refer to the four points of
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the compass, as well as not naming winds in terms of their orientation. For
the northern wind they use the name "suntri balbal'' (cold wind) and for the
southern "tati balbal" (hot wind). At the time they lived in tents they were
only interested in the quality of wind: cold or hot wind, as they were
interested in facing the tent door towards the hot wind.
The different codification of space also became obvious when students
were asked to describe their route from home to school, by narration as well
by drawing. The students didn’t use objective characteristics in this
description, as we can see in the following oral answers1 of some students
and in the drawing of one of the students:
Christ (10 years old)
Christ: I go down a descent from this way. Then I come madam…. Then I
arrive here at Panagiotis shop, then there is a head over hills, then I walk
not at the first narrow, at the third house, were Tasos lives, then we come at
the church and then……
Interviewer: Do you think that if you describe it in this way someone could
find the way from your home to school?
Christ: Yes.
Interviewer: Do you believe that you have described it well; do you know
which the street where you live is?
Christ: Do I know madam what it is?
Interviewer: Do you know which the name of the street is and which is the
number at the place you live?
Christ: No, I don’t know.
Interviewer: Would you like also you John to say us how do you come to
school?
Christ: Like me madam.
After a few minutes his brother gave his own description:
John (9 years old):
John: we go from here like this, we do one like this, there we walk, walk,
walk, then all the time straight, straight we go at Panagiotis shop, sometimes it
is…….he has a lot of flowers, madam, we turn from here, there are
prefabricated houses, then I arrive to the church, I say good morning for the
people, good morning for myself, and then I come to school, I come in….
Nick (7 years old)
Nick: I go to my godmother and here down, you go towards there
(indicating on left) and then towards there (indicating on right) and there we
are…
The design of John (8,5 years old)
1
Here are very bad English descriptions, but I didn’t correct them, as they were also bad in
Greek.
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Through the students' descriptions as well as in the above drawing, we
notice a diverse way concerning space notions and especially locating. In
contrast with non-Romany students who answered the same questions
accurately, describing their route by the use of streets' names and numbers,
Romany students did not apparently have the need for accurate definitions
for locating. Although Romany people, nowadays, leave in urban areas, due
to their traditional way of living they continue to be uninterested in accuracy
concerning locating, a characteristic of modern urban society.
This Romany student diverse perception regarding space notions, not
only had direct consequences in the cases where related spatial notions were
taught, causing cognitive conflicts, but also it had indirect ones. Students
without any familiarity in the precision of locating confronted difficulties in
finding where in their textbooks the teacher was referring. One even greater
problem the students confronted concerned the use of the formal algorithms
of addition and subtraction. It was difficult for Romany students to put the
digits of the same values in the same column. Although the students had
answered theses kinds of problems correctly, in the oral version, they had a
total conflict problem every time they tried to use formal mathematics
techniques.
Apart from the particular instances that are referred to above, the overall
atmosphere of the class was conflict-laden. Every day the students had to
leave at the door their own culture and to adopt another one in order to be
accepted. The teacher's reprimands followed every deviation of the
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classroom norms. The only way the students could survive in a place in
which they had to reject all of their cultural particularity, even their own
tongue, was to behave as 'non-Romany' students, with the obvious results.
Conclusions
The main reason we are interested in conflicts in the school context is to
explore the consequences for Romany students and for every group of
students that come from minority and marginal groups. Through our
research we noted that in school, compared with the state's rhetorical
statements about egalitarianism, the interaction between teacher and students
reflected the power relations of the greater society. The students feel that
their identity as Romany is not accepted, as was expressed through the
rejection of their mother tongue as well as the rejection of the informal
mathematics cognition that the students carry to school.
As Cummins (1999) notes, all over the world the majority of students
that have been rejected from schools come from communities whose
language, culture and identity have been underestimated and reduced by the
greater society. Very often schools reproduce and enforce this reduction by
punishing their students because either they use their own tongue or they use
the mathematical cognition that has been culturally acquired.
In the school context the conflict is in the starting point of teaching/
learning. The conflict, if we can speak for minority and marginal groups,
weighs heavily on students. Cultural conflict on the one hand leads students
to stop attending school, feeling like a pariah group, and having difficulties
to balance different identities. On the other hand, cultural conflict is related
to cognitive conflicts that students could not always overcome and a
consequence for them is to be of low aptitude in the school requirements.
If we as educators desire to empower minority students in school as well
as in society we should think seriously about the conflicts students
experience in school contexts. Approaches that take into consideration
cultural factors, such as Ethnomathematics, could provide a working
framework for improving the role of these students in school and in the
greater society. It is necessary, instead of confronting these students as
'pathological' cases, to display a respect for their culture in order to
contribute to a critical education, an equitable education for every citizen.
Minority students will really have the same opportunities in education/
mathematics education when the state takes seriously into consideration their
cultural particularities when designing educational provision. It is obvious
that the improvement of education as well of the life of minority students is
mostly a political issue, and it is necessary that any changes that may occur
have to have a long duration in order to achieve effective results.
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