Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

DOING ACTION RESEARCH DIFFERENTLY 39
a university degree). The footnote also contains the MST’s original slogan:
‘occupying, resisting, producing’ and its revized slogan: ‘land reform: everyone’s
struggle’.
The article shows clearly the influence of Paulo Freire’s liberatory pedagogy.
The emphasis is on praxis, through engaging landless people in critical
examination of mathematical knowledge closely related to their practical
needs. The knowledge base on which the article draws is largely Latin
American, only three of the references being to British or North American
publications, two of these to book chapters on ethnomathematics written
by Knijnik herself and another Brazilian. There are also a small number of
references to Spanish and Portuguese publications. Social justice is the
driving motivation behind the article whose discourse is structured around
concepts such as ‘struggle,’ ‘subordination,’ ‘power,’ ‘legitimacy’ and
‘culture’. Like Walker, Knijnik’s analysis of power and the nature of knowledge
is subtle; she avoids dichotomizing issues and uses the tools of contemporary
sociology such as the concept of ‘social and cultural capital’ to
analyse the needs of MST in relation to mathematical knowledge (Bourdieu
is her one wholly ‘first world’ reference).
Her starting point is that mathematics is ‘a cultural system permeated
with power relations’ within which academic mathematics is just one form
among many deriving from different cultural groups. However, it has legitimacy
in the dominant culture that has power to allocate jobs and wealth.
She draws on Julia Verela’s analysis of the status given by the Jesuits to
decontextualized knowledge to illustrate that ‘knowledges are legitimately
constituted and become dominant knowledges through a social process
rather than because they are inherently superior, more refined and “scientific”
versions of reality.’ To illustrate popular mathematical knowledge in
Brazil she gives the example of Cubaçāo, a system for estimating the size of
a piece of land that produces comparable results to academic mathematics,
rounded upwards.
Knijnik gives a clear overview of three approaches to popular knowledge:
first the ‘ethnocentric’ which defines knowledge from the standpoint
of the dominant class and defines ‘popular mathematics’ as ‘a deficiency, a
backwardness, “non-cultures” – like “non-mathematics”’; second, ‘ethnomathematics’,
which approaches popular mathematics as a coherent cultural
system that should be described ‘from a point of view which is not
external to the context in which they are produced’, so that the values, codes
which give them meaning, and, in turn, give meaning to such mathematics,
can be described within their own logic; and third, ‘cultural legitimacy’,
which does not disregard the differential social status that attaches to academic
and popular mathematics and suggests ‘interpreting popular cultures
from the standpoint of their relationship with the legitimate culture’. These
three standpoints imply different pedagogical approaches and it is the third
that Knijnik describes as characterizing her work with MST.