17. Bringing ethnomathematical perspectives into classrooms

In this chapter, we offer some suggestions, informed by our personal histories and experiences, as to how ethnomathematical perspectives might enrich school mathematics classrooms. We regard this as inherently political work, in terms of combatting the intellectual White supremacy that pervades the Eurocentric narrative of the history of academic mathematics and that is explicitly or subliminally everpresent in so many mathematics classrooms. Likewise, we argue that the ongoing worldwide homogenisation of school mathematics is unhealthy. Above all, we argue that school mathematics is culpably deficient in terms of its relations with other forms of mathematical activities and insofar as it does characterise such relationships, often harmfully misleading.