Teaching and Learning Issues in Mathematics in the Context of Nepal

INTRODUCTION

Nepal is a member state of the United Nations (UN) since (1955). The country has been trying to abide by the international treaties, agreements, and declarations of UN and its organizations in relation to human rights, basic and higher education, economy, and public health. As a result, Nepal adopted the Education for All 2000 and Dakar Framework of Action (2000) (UNESCO 2015). The Curriculum Development Center (CDC) of Nepal also prepared and implemented a National Curriculum Framework for School Education in Nepal 2007. This framework speaks of various provisions of school education focusing globalization, modernization, decentralization, and localization of curriculum in the Nepalese context” (CDC 2007, p. 1). The framework was based on the following contemporary issues of school education in Nepal – socio-cultural, curricular, 
educational (norms, values, life skills, employment), technological, linguistic, instructional, assessment

related, research-based, and quality and relevancy based. The basis of curriculum development has outlined many important points including integrated, child-centered, basic education in mother tongue, inclusive, local need-based, Sanskrit as a foundation for Eastern knowledge base, IT supported, and life skill oriented (CDC 2007). Despite Nepal’s commitment to providing quality education in general and mathematics education by ensuring equity and access, there are so many issues of teaching and learning mathematics in Nepalese context. Some of these issues are related to theories, and others are practical in nature. These issues are related to classroom management, ethnicity, lack of trained teachers, inequity, lack of teaching aids and materials, lack of textbooks, lack of time for students, lack of clear objectives, gender issues, and issues of mathematical contents and pedagogy. In our understanding, most of the public schools in Nepal do not have proper management of the classrooms. They have an inappropriate size of classes, not inclusive seating arrangement, and there is also lack of technology for learning and teaching mathematics. There is a misuse of technological tools even if it is available.

THEORETICAL ISSUES

There are many theories and philosophies in mathematics education. Radical and social constructivism are the two philosophies and theories that have been widely debated and discussed in the literature of mathematics education (Belbase 2014). The views of mathematics such as mathematics as a foreign subject, mathematics as a collection of symbols, mathematics as a meaningless subject, mathematics as a body of pure knowledge, and mathematics as an objective knowledge (Luitel 2009) have dominated the worldview of most of the math teachers and curriculum experts in Nepal. Therefore, the subsequent action of teaching and learning and curricular practices in mathematics have been severely affected by such worldviews. We would like to present some theoretical issues of radical and social constructivism of mathematics education in this section. The choice of these two dominant theories are based on contemporary debate on whether learning mathematics is an individual or social phenomenon and the nature of Nepalese social and cultural value system.

SOCIAL ISSUES

In our understanding, the major social issues of teaching mathematics are issues of language,

issues of gender, ethnicity, and social justice in the context of Nepal. We reflect on each of them in

brief. The low educational and social background is directly and strictly related to low results (MOE

2013).

LANGUAGE ISSUES

The language is not merely a means of communication, but it is also a vehicle of understanding. Students make sense or create meaning in their language. The most efficient way to make meaning or creating a concept of mathematics is in one's mother language. We think, there is a lack of ability and lack of understanding because students' languages are different in school and home context. The ‘official' mathematics is socially and culturally neutral in the context of Nepal. There is increasing awareness of language and its impacts on mathematics learning (Orton 1996). The language forms and strategies used in mathematics teaching differently favor some social groups over others. We realized that language is one of the major cause of marginalization because our teachers support some students while it may disadvantage other students through the choice of language used in the classroom. Some students might be excluded from the classroom practice due to language as a barrier. Hence, there exists a social class of students that has the poor participation and less engagement in the classroom (Scada 1992) due to the difference of school language being different from home language.

GENDER ISSUES

There is an issue of differential attainment between genders. The female students may have less interest in studying mathematics beyond schools in our context. There are so many causes behind girls not liking to continue mathematics at the higher level. The parents might give less priority to the daughters, and their daughters are not getting equal opportunities as their sons. The early marriage can be another reason for women not choosing mathematics at a higher level. They have an extra burden to take care of home and accomplish the responsibilities. The belief that women have the inherent capacity as carers and nurturers than taking the challenge to learn a difficult subject is another social taboo. Therefore, women do care and feed children than men do in our context. Therefore, the issues of gender are more challenging in teaching and learning mathematics providing equal opportunity to both boys and girls in schools. There are social barriers to go to study in schools for many girls. In our Muslim culture in Nepal, most of the families or parents want to send their daughters to Madarashas or single sex (female only) schools. But there are only a few numbers of Muslim schools (i.e. Madarashas) in Nepal. Hence, the disparity of male and female child is due to the social factor. Our society is the male dominated, and our mathematics classrooms are also male dominated. In our experience, females have poor participation and performance in mathematics classroom in general. This can be seen in their performance in mathematics. The National Assessment of Student Achievement (NASA) report (MOE 2015) shows that male students outperformed girls in mathematics all geographical regions in Nepal in all content areas. This issue has been reported to be true for all ethnic groups in Nepal (MOE 2015).

SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES

The next issue is social justice. It is necessary for educating the mathematics learners and teachers about social justice. In our opinion, when the teachers deliberate their knowledge to the students, there is a hierarchical position of the teacher and students. There is a power relation between the students and teachers. The teachers may observe the social status of students (or their families) and treat them accordingly by discriminating based on social class. The students have a different position in the classroom based on which social group do they belong to and how they present themselves in the class depends on where they come from. These are ongoing unfair practices in teaching and learning mathematics in Nepal, and these practices are the primary causes of social injustice in the classrooms (Panthi 2016). This problem raises another issue as a tailing effect on inclusion. This issue leads to classroom teaching that may not be inclusive. The classroom may not be appropriate or just for teaching and learning mathematics. The teacher does not care all students equally because he or she focuses on the first rows of good students. There might be some disadvantaged students in a classroom due to the lack of fulfilling their needs of mathematics learning.

TECHNOLOGICAL ISSUES

Nepal started technology application for teacher education since 1970s through Radio Education Teacher Training Project funded by USAID (Holmes 1990). The project introduced the Radio Mathematics Program to selected schools as a piloting project in 1989 (Holmes 1990). Since then, the Government of Nepal Ministry of Education has been training teachers through radio education. These efforts could train thousands of primary school teachers. However, the country still lacks a broader application of technology in teaching and learning mathematics. These programs made the rest of Nepal dependent on Kathmandu for resources both human and physical (Holmes 1990). These days too, there are wider applications of Internet technology by the public, but almost none in teaching and learning mathematics in rural areas. The major issues of teaching and learning mathematics with technology are the lack of knowledge of technology, affordances and constraints in teaching with technology, and the issue of using technology in the particular area of mathematics. The National Curriculum Framework for School Education in Nepal 2007 outlines some key guidelines for technology integration in education. However, the same document accepts that there has been an issue in the practical implementation of ICT in education in general and it can also be an issue mathematics education. It states that “ICT has not been properly addressed by the curriculum.

CONCLUSION

We highlighted different issues of teaching and learning mathematics and the idea of resolving them in a practical way. We have suggested different measure in addressing these matters. However, we might not be dealing with these issues wholly, or we may not be able to achieve the goal right away because these are the emergent issues depending on the emergent situations. In our opinion, the depth studies in each of these issues may give more feasible ideas to solve them. We would like to suggest to the government, academic institutions and different stakeholders such as curriculum planners, policy makers, experts, teachers, students and parents to be serious and aware of these issues and their consequence. It needs a collective effort of all to resolve them. A strong commitment, dedication, and desire of all are must to address these problems and improve the quality and equity in mathematics teaching and learning in Nepal.