Abstract
The purpose of this study was to explore the critical life-events of the first author's journey of learning and teaching mathematics that prompted critical thinking about his past experiences as a student and teacher. It portrays a paradigmatic shift from a traditionalist thinker to a constructivist actor in the classroom from the critical life-events within and out of classroom experiences by using autoethnography as the writing and research genre by connecting his personal experiences in the social, cultural, and teaching/learning contexts of Nepal. The major themes emerged from the autoethnography were-- Thinking Narratively: Joining a School and Dropping Out; Thinking Narratively: Back to School and Dropping In; Thinking Interpretively: Dropping out of School; Thinking Poetically: Dropping in School; and Nightmare of the First Teaching: A Pedagogical Boomerang. These themes portrayed a pedagogical boomerang in learning and teaching mathematics from a remote village in Western Nepal to the neighborhood of the capital city Kathmandu.
Highlights
Mathematics teaching and learning in Nepal seem to have several issues, challenges, and ongoing problems despite efforts to reform curriculum, teaching-learning practices, and assessments to integrate traditional cultural relevance to the classroom or modern technological advances of digital gadgets and Internet
This study focused on the first author's personal-professional journey as a mathematics learner to a teacher in a transformative process from an authoritarian to a collaborative teacher
This way, I used autoethnography as a means to express myself as a researcher and researched at the same time bringing my experiences upfront in the context of Nepal bridging the educational issues of past four decades to the recent raising voice to call for a change [19, 20]
Summary
Mathematics teaching and learning in Nepal (and possibly other places) seem to have several issues, challenges, and ongoing problems despite efforts to reform curriculum, teaching-learning practices, and assessments to integrate traditional cultural relevance to the classroom or modern technological advances of digital gadgets and Internet. The notion of the traditional cultural relevance of mathematics teaching and learning emphasized local context and practices without constructing critical mathematical tasks for higherlevel reasoning and thinking [1, 2]. The integration of modern technological advancement with mathematics teaching-learning has not yet been fully realized in mathematics curriculum and pedagogy. The National Curriculum Framework (NCF) of Nepal [4] emphasized a traditional and modern approach to teaching-learning with both open and regular classroom-based education in Nepal. The modern approach to education emphasized the notion of globalization and global village balancing the Journal homepage: http://edulearn.intelektual.org
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