Anita Rampal

The Convention on the Rights of the Child and the aims of education it recommends require that the curriculum must be of direct relevance to the child's social, cultural, environmental, and economic context. This may seem ubiquitously unproblematic and, yet, encompasses some of the most contentious issues and challenges of contemporary curriculum development. In low-income countries with deeply differentiated and widely pluralistic societies, still unable to provide elementary education to large sections of children, struggling with local issues of human development – of sustenance and survival – while also aspiring for a place in the global market, notions of curricular relevance and context are becoming increasingly contested.

The aim of the Discussion Group is to capture the sense of the community, not only from experts about standardized testing. Reflection should provide a report to consider implications to global policies. How standardized testing favour math education aims and how much sensitive is to diversity? A regular view is “Standardized tests are needed because they can provide an amount of information and evidence of validity. Of course there can be incorrect interpretations from using any test, but these can be reduced if the quality of the test has the attributes that are associated with standardized assessments” A critical approach is to highlight “Limited Scope of standardized tests in school maths, because these tests undermine abilities to conjecture and to encourage open problems in class. Standardized testing devalues abilities to collaborate, to take risks, and to engage in real-world experience; failing to the mission of schooling: the pursuit of happiness and justice of all. In thi...

Most countries advocate ideals of an authentic and culturally relevant mathematics curriculum. These ideals, however, are either lost in translation from the intended to the enacted curriculum or are subsumed by the challenging dilemmas of whose ‘cultural relevance’ needs to be addressed and how. We describe recent innovative initiatives in India and Australia to indicate how these ideals are operationalised in the intended curriculum within very diverse contexts. In India, culturally relevant thematic units were designed as part of the national primary mathematics textbooks drawing upon the knowledge and living contexts of people from the world of work, vocations, and crafts. In Australia, authentic inquiry-based units in a predominantly urban context engaged students in complex problems within their lived experiences. Although in dramatically different contexts, this paper delineates common opportunities and challenges in both that are worth exploring.

... of predominantly rural children as well as teachers, is embodied in the Hoshangabad Science Teaching Programme (HSTP) (Mukund, 1988; Rampal ... authority, has sought to introduce various activities requiring students to experiment with the teacher's or 'guruji's' watch and ...

... He notes that in pre-literate societies there is little recogni-tion of ambiguity in utterances" it is ... simple models or demonstrations, and were intended primarily for the use of working-class schools ... an answer, it is his demand for explicit-ness that enables both to work as partners in ...

This article concludes theInterchange debate on the author's own “A Possible ‘Orality’ for Science?” (Interchange, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 227–244). The author contrasts two movements in science education: Science for Scientists and Science for All. The author maintains that we need to review the language of science to the end of producing a more palatable school science curriculum for

Asymptotic series expansions for the wave functions and energy levels of the doubly anharmonic-oscillator system of the ax 2+ bx 4+ cx 6 type have been obtained. The asymptotic expansion for the wave function reduces to a sequence of exact solutions of ...

We study the generalized anharmonic oscillator in three dimensions described by the potentials of the form ∑2m+1k=1bkr 2k. An asymptotic analysis of the Schro¨dinger equation yields the leading asymptotic behavior of the energy eigenfunctions in terms of the dominant (m+1) coupling constants bk, m+1≤k≤2m+1. Using an ansatz which incorporates this asymptotic behavior, we reduce the eigenvalue equation to an (m+2)-term

... He notes that in pre-literate societies there is little recogni-tion of ambiguity in utterances" it is ... simple models or demonstrations, and were intended primarily for the use of working-class schools ... an answer, it is his demand for explicit-ness that enables both to work as partners in ...

This paper traverses the path of critical education and reflection sought by activist academics who, in various capacities, strove to change curricula for science and mathematics education at the state and national levels. The National Literacy Campaign in the 90s had offered space to understand people's lived realities and mediate everyday math in the teaching learning processes, through a constructive critique of the hegemonic and alienating nature of the school subject. Subsequently, within the ambit of the National Curriculum Framework 2005 and the Right to Education Act 2009, the national primary math textbooks attempted to (re)mediate the experience of neo-literate adults, to address diverse children's knowledge through a (re)humanising pedagogy of empathy, despite the constraints of a large bureaucratic and increasingly neo-liberal state system.

In a meeting of the Rural Schools Project (Nelson Mandela Foundation, 2005) in South Africa in 2004, I inadvertently stirred a hornet's nest. I had wondered why plastic tables and chairs were considered such a priority in primary schools, even at the cost of other pressing needs to ensure better learning. In South Africa and India most children do not sit on such furniture as part of their home culture. There was an expression of loud fist-thumping indignation by many black educators, declaring that things they had earlier been deprived of in schools should now be ‘rightfully’ theirs. How can children write otherwise? It was demeaning and inhuman ‘to sit on the floor and write’, they proclaimed. Well-meaning emotion, perhaps, but somewhat misplaced. It refused to acknowledge the coherence of culture and cognition. An interesting debate ensued, and at one point I went on to demonstrate how most people in India still chose to sit on the floor cross-legged, even in prestigious political meetings or musical gatherings. This is the basic posture many Westerners might pay substantial sums to emulate as part of their yoga classes! However, the question remained. Why was Africa, the Cradle of Writing, held in deference by the world for its ingenious initiation and imaginative use of papyrus and quill, now finding it demeaning to write without tables and chairs?

This article concludes theInterchange debate on the author's own “A Possible ‘Orality’ for Science?” (Interchange, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 227–244). The author contrasts two movements in science education: Science for Scientists and Science for All. The author maintains that we need to review the language of science to the end of producing a more palatable school science curriculum for all of our pupils.

In this article, written in “interchange” with Anita Rampal's “A Possible ‘Orality’ for Science?” (Interchange, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 227–244), a distinction is made between (A) aims of science, which is a philosophical issue; (B) the existence of forms of thought in their own right; and (C) the question of whether we teach the most important forms. The general conclusion is that we have to subject students to transcendental forms of thought irrespective of their social or cultural background, by whatever methods are most appropriate.