ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE WORLD

Panel 04: Multimathemacy: an anthropology of mathematical literacy

Paper Title:

Anthropology of Space and the Urban Boundaries: a study centred in the communitarian education.

Authors:

Mônica Mesquita – Lisbon University/ Institute of Education.

Filipa Ramalhete – Autonomous University of Lisbon / Department of Architecture.

Ana Paula Caetano – Lisbon University / Institute of Education.

Short Abstract: (300 characters)

A study of urban spaces where the presence of the invisible beings and the gap of act reveal themselves as a transverse wave has been requiring an interdisciplinar research on the concept of space. The proposal is to share fieldwork experiences in two invisible communities (Portugal) following the Curriculum Trivium.

Abstract: (250 words)

The research project Urban Boundaries was designed to attend needs from three different cultural groups and includes members of each group. The academic group focuses on the necessity of an emancipatory educational policy while the Bairro group is centred on the urge of having water supply in their territory and the Fishing group wishes strengthening their professional and social voice.

Therefore, Urban Boundaries focus is on diversity: actors with different social, geographic, history, cultural, and school backgrounds. In face of this diversity, the structure of this project is based on a flexible sketch, where different voices can be heard, having as a common stage the fieldwork data collected in two urban communities.

We will explore on this paper, looking to the Concept of Act from Slavoj Zizek, the encounter of these communities, which two of them (Bairro and Fishing) have as main characteristic the presence of the cultural groups that are materially and symbolically marginalized in the urban central area, and the mathematical literacy of them as a tool to work the situcionalidade of these communities, on Paulo Freire’ sense.

The Curriculum Trivium, developed by Ubiratan D’Ambrosio, appears on this project as category of the dialogue among the three involved groups and as category of analysis in the understanding, recognition, and empowerment of the communitarian educational processes as tools of survival.

THREE “ETHNOS”: ETHNOBIOLOGY, ETHNOMATHEMATICS, AND ETHNOGRAPHY LIVED IN TWO LOCAL COMMUNITIES FROM COSTA DE CAPARICA, PORTUGAL. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Lia Laporta¹   Mônica Mesquita² ,  

¹University of Ghent, Belgium

²University of Lisbon, Portugal

Corresponding author:  mbmesquita@ie.ul.PT

The Urban Boundaries Project has the challenging work to develop an emancipatory educative policy through participant observation of knowledge inside two multicultural communities (the fishing community and the community of Terras da Costa) of the city of Costa de Caparica, Portugal. Through a Critical Ethnography approach, members of these two communities are actively participating in the construction of an autonomous management of their own knowledge. In this process, Ethnomathematics and Ethnobiology emerged as a broader and integrative  perspective over coastal/land/human resource management, embedded in both the Curriculum Trivium developed by Ubiratan D’Ambrosio (a new model of curriculum, based on literacy, materacy, and technoracy) and in the concepts of local, traditional/historical ecological knowledge (LEK,TEK) as defined by Fikret Berkes. The three “ethnos”, therefore, were not a choice. They were the real movement around this research, which has allowed the voices of all participants to appear in its construction. With this innovative background theoretical, we aim at (1) highlighting the knowledge of local communities pointing out and discussing eventual contradictions; (2) guaranteeing a global curriculum that maintains cultural diversity, and (3) bring to life expectations of minimizing inequities and violations of human dignity, as a first step towards social justice and an adaptive, ecosystem-based resource management.  This search and comprehension process, regarding intra and intercultural dimensions, is essential not only to clarify the educative processes developed inside the local communities, towards local necessities defined by their members, but also to the “symbolic” recognition of such communities by society as a whole – acknowledging them as being both an active and interactive part of the cultural diversity they represent and of the urban hegemony they are geographically included in.

acceptance Poster_CISE Foto_CISE

The Urban Boundaries Project: Towards an emancipatory educational policy

Alexandre Pais and Mônica Mesquita

Together with globalization, the concern with diversity is currently considered to be one of the two main educational functions. While globalization refers to the social need to respond to market globalization,  which imposes a convergent education by training individuals to perform a role in the global society, diversity demands  an integration of different cultures in a model of divergent education, able to educate citizens in what has been called equity within diversity. To conciliate these two educational tasks could be a source of problems, as documented by recent research on the cultural dimension of education. This is especially the case in countries such as the Nordic ones, where national cultural minorities and newer immigrant populations have been posing new challenges for education. In many cases, these populations rely more on non-formal educational sites, based in their everyday lives, than in the formal setting of school education, where they often experience problems of exclusion. Our intention with this paper is to present and discuss an ongoing project based in Portugal, where a team of people from different backgrounds are starting to work collaboratively with two minority communities. Through the development of a critical alphabetization, a multiple cartography and life-history portfolios we seek to address the educational needs of these populations in situ, that is, in the midst of their everyday lives where survival with dignity is often the first and foremost important daily struggle. Therefore, it is the everyday problems felted by these two communities that guide the organization of parameters that support a multicultural education curriculum based on the socio-cultural and economic reality of these communities. This way, we seek to address the tension between globalization and diversity by means of submitting this two educational aims to the needs of the communities which have been systematically excluded both from globalization and from the social recognition of their differences. We take advantage of the recent theorization of postmodern multiculturalism made by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, and we deploy a qualitative methodology informed by critical ethnography.

Network: Multicultural educational research

Presentation_NERA acceptance