:: RESEARCH ::

My ongoing doctoral research aims at developing a transformative philosophy of mathematics teacher education in order to develop a vision for culturally contextualised mathematics education in Nepal. My research includes a number of referents (frameworks zoomed in to a point) including Culture Studies of Mathematics and Science Education, Integralism and Critical Spirituality. In so doing, I have been making use of alternative-inclusive logics in order for an inclusive and transformative approach to mathematics education.

Transformative perspectives consider education to be an empowering endeavour by providing learners with opportunities of questioning about hidden assumptions being saturated in their consciousness. Although it may be frightening for some, a transformative education takes us to the journey of various structural shifts of knowing, being and valuing thereby promoting the image of learner as an active questioner, meaning maker and reflective practitioner rather than a mere fact collector. I am not only developing a transformative philosophy but also committed to embody this approach via the process of my inquiry which is guided by emerging research paradigms (critical, postmodern, integral and many others in between them). Such paradigms have offered potentially powerful methods of inquiry, many of which offer exciting, yet challenging, ways to diffuse many positivism-inspired unhelpful dichotomies, such as researched and researcher, data collection and data generation, field work and writing, self and other, and fact and fiction, permeated by post/positivist epistemology. I have been using auto/ethnography, which promotes a dialectical relationship between being and writing, experiencing and reflecting, and self and culture, a means to which I can see the nexus between my ‘self’ and ‘culture’ as a source of sustainable transformation.

My master’s research can also give an example of how I have used an arts-based auto-ethnographic inquiry. You can click here to read my Master’s project.