Roots/Routes

Abstract

This narrative acts as an articulation of a journey of many routes. Following Part I of the same research journey of rootedness/routedness, it debates the nature of transformation and transcendence beyond personal and political paradoxes informed by neoliberalism and related repressive globalizing discourses. Through a more personal, descriptive, and philosophical approach, the author seeks to move, in a reflexive manner, beyond the delimiting roots of deficit discourse and its unrootedness with the daily, local, and lived. Through the use of a nontraditional writing—research approach, the author explores other, less objectifying, ways of being in research and attempts to provide alternative pedagogies of possibility away from dichotomous and positivist research engagement. By confronting socially constructed knowledges and identities, and “(re)sourcing” these through “humble togetherness” (Ubuntu), the storying seeks to find a transcendent spirituality through the routes/roots of research and achieve the emergence of transformative possibilities through pedagogies of hope!

Keywords

transformation transcendence (re)sourcing disadvantage poverty dilemma performance reflexivity

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Battle, M. (1997). Reconciliation: The Ubuntu theology of Desmond Tutu. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim.

Bernstein, B. (2000). Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research and critique. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Buber, M. (1996). I and thou (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). New York: Touchstone.

Derrida, J. (2001). I have a taste for the secret (G. Donis, Trans.) . In J. Derrida & M. Ferraris (Eds.), A taste for the secret (pp. 1-92). Cambridge, UK: Polity. (Original work published 1997)

Dowling, P.C. (1998). The sociology of mathematics education: Mathematical myths/pedagogic texts. London: Falmer.

Freire, P. (1999). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.

Garoian, C.R. (1999). Performing pedagogy: Toward an art of politics . Albany: State University of New York Press.

Krog, A. (2000). Country of my skull: Guilt, sorrow, and the limits of forgiveness in the New South Africa. New York: Three Rivers Press.

McLaren, P. , Leonardo, Z. , & Allen, R.L. (2000). Epistemologies of Whiteness: Transgressing and transforming pedagogical knowledge. In R. Mahalingam & C. McCarthy (Eds.), Multicultural curriculum: New directions for social theory, practice, and policy (pp. 108-123). New York: Routledge.

10.

Roman, L.G. (1993). White is a color! White defensiveness, postmodernism, and anti-racist pedagogy. In C. McCarthy & W. Crichlow (Eds.), Race, identity and representation in education (pp. 71-88). New York: Routledge.

11.

Swanson, D.M. (1998). Bridging the boundaries? A study of mainstream mathematics, academic support and "disadvantaged learners" in an independent, secondary school in the Western Cape (South Africa). Unpublished master's dissertation, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.

12.

Swanson, D.M. (2002). "Disadvantage" and school mathematics: The politics of context. International Journal of Learning, 9, 1471-1480.

13.

Swanson, D.M. (2004). Voices in the silence: Narratives of disadvantage, social context and school mathematics in post-apartheid South Africa. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia , Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. (To be published by VDM Verlag in 2009)

14.

Swanson, D.M. (2005). School mathematics, discourse and the politics of context. In A. Chronaki & I. Christiansen (Eds.), Challenging perspectives on mathematics classroom communication (pp. 261-294). Greenwich, CT: Information Age.

15.

Swanson, D.M. (2007). Silent voices, silent bodies: Difference and disadvantage in schooling contexts. In S. Springgay & D. Freedman (Eds.), Curriculum and the cultural body (pp. 63-78). New York: Peter Lang.

16.

Tutu, D. (2000). No future without forgiveness. New York: Doubleday.