Decolonising technological pedagogical content knowledge of first year mathematics students

Abstract

AbstractDecolonising students’ knowledge of technology, pedagogy, and mathematics content is important because it helps students understand their learning needs. Decolonisation is a process of critiquing and renewing the curriculum. Learning needs are circumstances that demand individuals’ actions in order to address professional, personal, and/or social needs. The purpose of this article is to explore and decolonise students’ knowledge of technology, pedagogy, and content in the learning of first year Bachelor of Education mathematics. Ten students learned a mathematics module at a South African university and were purposively selected to participate in this study. Semi-structured interviews, observation, and reflective activities/questionnaires, framed by critical action research, were used for data generation. The students’ knowledge revealed that the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) was useful when used as the learning framework, which generated curriculum concepts for the module to support the student knowledge of technology, pedagogy, and content. The concepts were learning needs, content, goals, activities, time, environment, community, assessment, and GeoGebra resources. GeoGebra was the main learning resource that helped the students to integrate other resources into the module. The study concluded that, although the technological and content knowledge dominated the learning in other cases of the module, the pedagogical knowledge which was a result of their self-reflection to understand their identities, drove the module all the time. This study, consequently, recommends that students should use their knowledge of technology, pedagogy, and content as taxonomies of learning, in order to address mathematics, individual, and societal needs through the integration of technology.