Mathematics Education in Africa: The Fourth Industrial Revolution

342 Pages·2022·7.082 MB·English

by  Brantina Chirinda, Kakoma Luneta, Alphonse Uworwabayeho

Brantina Chirinda
Kakoma Luneta
Alphonse Uworwabayeho   Editors
Mathematics
Education in
Africa
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Mathematics Education in Africa
Brantina Chirinda • Kakoma Luneta
Alphonse Uworwabayeho
Editors
Mathematics Education
in Africa
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Editors
Brantina Chirinda Kakoma Luneta
Faculty of Education Faculty of Education
Cape Peninsula University of Technology University of Johannesburg
Cape Town, South Africa Johannesburg, South Africa
Alphonse Uworwabayeho
University of Rwanda
College of Education (URCE)
Kayonza, Rwanda
ISBN 978-3-031-13926-0 ISBN 978-3-031-13927-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13927-7
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Foreword
In 2009, I worked with teachers first in South Africa and then in Tanzania later that
year. In both contexts, I was struck by the widespread teacher use of smart ‘cell-
phones’, which at that time were used largely for social purposes. In contrast, in
England, I had come from, yes, many teachers owned a mobile phone of some sort,
but smartphones were not common: for many, the preferred mode of remote com-
munication was via a landline telephone or email supported by a laptop or desktop
computer. The general population in at least sub-Saharan Africa, abetted by canny
marketing approaches by multinational corporations, has largely ‘leapfrogged’
landline and desk-based technology in favour of mobile technologies and so has
developed a quite distinct emerging digital culture.
Excitingly, that has brought with it many teachers confidence to engage profes-
sionally and creatively with WhatsApp and other phone software, though data
charges, and related taxes, remain an issue. By 2019, the teachers in rural Uganda
with whom I had the pleasure to work had only intermittent access to electricity, but
they were avid users of their phones for social and professional purposes. However –
and here is a key challenge for education – many had no digital technology available
to their students, and the coronavirus pandemic has shown very starkly that that
remains the case across large swathes of Africa. Inevitably, twin challenges of reli-
able access to electricity and student access to appropriate digital technologies serve
to constrain what teachers can sensibly aim for in terms of education for a ‘Fourth
Industrial Revolution (4IR)’ – but this remarkable book shows that at present, that
has not dampened the aspirations, nor the creativity and solution-focus, with which
many are approaching that task.
The 4IR is a term that has been in circulation for some decades now, but this book
adopts the usage made by Schwab (2016) for the World Economic Forum. It repre-
sents a paradigm shift in how technology is becoming embedded within human societ-
ies, an amalgamation of digital, biological, economic, and physical-digital affordances
impacting all industries and economies simultaneously. The World Economic Forum
narratives suggest the 4IR offers a panacea to contemporary development problems,
comprising the driving force behind the future AI economy. However, there are clear
threats arising from an apparently inexorable march to such aspirations: Jones and Ng
v
vi Foreword
(2021, p. 1) point very lucidly to ‘The dangers of this so-called “revolution” ….
already evident in terms of cyber-attacks, fake news, threats to data security, and the
detrimental effects of social media use on mental health and well-being.’ There are
bigger questions about who is shaping these technologies and why?
As a species, we live in, and our education systems should arguably be educating
for, a world in which even current levels of consumption have given rise to global-
level ‘wicked problems’ of depletion of resources, massive and growing health and
economic inequalities, and environmental degradation. Nevertheless, can Africa,
already in many ways ‘left behind’ in terms of economic wealth, afford not to chase
the same goals of increasing digitalisation and unbridled consumption? The ‘global
north’ needs to reduce consumption, and while equity would suggest much of Africa
should have access to greater material wealth, there is still in Africa rampant con-
sumption that threatens the health of the planet: for example, there is a need for
access to clean and affordable piped water, rather than ever-increasing volumes of
single-use plastic bottles. Africa is already the site of some of the most major
impacts on the environment of growing electronic waste disposal and increasing
rates of deforestation to feed the fourth industrial revolution: Jones and Ng (2021)
argue that ‘a sustainable mathematics education is much more than learning about
numbers and shapes but noticing the world differently through mathematics to make
responsible decisions to improve the well-being of not only human communities but
also the environment and the eco-system at large’.
So it is becoming increasingly important that we educate our young people – and
wider populations – to understand and challenge both the potential of rapidly devel-
oping digital technologies and their constraints. With economic power very much in
the hands of the already-rich nations and invested in ever-expanding economies and
consumption, that will take wisdom and integrity, as well as a hitherto-unrealised
profound commitment to equity of opportunity and access to resources.
This book is an aspirational one that attempts to characterise the preparedness
of mathematics education in Africa to educate, in the fullest sense of the word, for
the 4IR, to evaluate its potential impact and ask difficult questions about what is
really required for mathematics education in the next 50 years. Further, and ambi-
tiously, the book takes a pan-African lens on that endeavour.
Authors cite a range of prior evidence that much of Africa has still not engaged
productively with the Third Industrial Revolution – and that that extends to mathe-
matics classrooms across schools and universities where, as well as challenges of
reliable access to the internet and appropriate hardware, many teachers frequently
remain under-equipped mathematically and pedagogically to harness digital tech-
nologies for mathematical and wider purposes. National and international assess-
ments show effective education for mathematical thinking at scale remains elusive.
Most chapters in this book, in some way, underline, and often evidence, such chal-
lenges. For example, Luneta in Chap. 2 says, ‘the ability to represent ordinary mar-
ket artefacts into living mathematics illustrations require teachers that are
comfortable in mathematics and have the skills of problem formulation and solv-
ing’; Kamina and Ochieng in Chap. 3 argue that ‘Challenges to address with imple-
menters of a competency-based curriculum involve (i) for experienced teachers,
Foreword vii
making the shift to explicitly integrate soft skills during instruction, from long expe-
rience of teaching mathematics procedurally with independent seatwork to learning
conceptually and collaboratively in small groups with discussions; (ii) inclusive and
safe classroom management that permits learner’s creativity, self-e fficacy, innova-
tion and much more self-directed and thus deepened learning.’
However, that situation is, in fact, broadly similar across many materially richer
regions of the world (e.g. Golding & Lyakhova, 2021), and many jurisdictions in
Africa have a comparatively short recent history of formal mass education for math-
ematics, often beginning from colonial models of both broad and mathematical edu-
cation ill-suited to the mathematics of place where the young most naturally build
mathematical meaning, as eloquently argued in Chap. 2.
So a key theme in this book is that, across phases, many teachers in Africa con-
tinue to struggle with both digital and mathematical equipping that would enable
them to better harness technology for an enlightened and genuinely empowering
mathematical education. There are no ‘quick fixes’ to such a situation, though sev-
eral case studies included in this volume point to the ongoing need for teachers of
mathematics at all levels to have ready access to subject-specific, including peda-
gogical, professional development that starts where they are, responds to their
needs, and is interspersed with the building of renewed classroom practice.
However, in common with much of the globe, the coronavirus pandemic has
catalysed the rethinking of what is currently possible for teachers and learners while
also exposing key limitations. This book offers evidence that many teachers in
Africa have had limited opportunity to develop either digital or digital pedagogy
skills and that many African jurisdictions currently lack a coherent digital education
policy to address that. In terms of digital equipping, there are challenges around
both infrastructure – stable and broad bandwidth is a pervasive challenge – and
equity of access to established, let alone emerging, digital tools and software: smart-
phones are widespread, though not uniformly, but laptops and tablets much less so,
and emerging technologies such as 3-D printers are widely beyond the experience
of teachers currently in the classroom. Recent experiences, though, have shown that
with policy organisation and will, exposure to technical advances for educational
purposes can take place remotely: teachers very often do not need personal experi-
ence of supercomputers or robotic manufacturing, but they benefit from a horizon-
feeding that gives them, and so their learners, access to understanding the potential,
but also the limitations, of such tools.
For mathematics education purposes, and still more for any possibility of
reaping the rewards of integrated STEM education, teachers also need a deeply
robust and conceptual grasp of mathematics and its pedagogy, as well as of digital
tools, digital pedagogies and their potential for mathematics education. Several
chapters in this book show that curricula in many African jurisdictions are, as else-
where in the globe, little changed from those in place a century ago and unfit for
purpose in a world where creativity, problem-solving, collaboration, imagination,
and core literacies that include data and digital literacies are likely to be of more
value than reproductive procedures – as well as not capitalising on the contextual
and cultural knowledge that learners bring with them. What a waste of potential!
viii Foreword
However, in mathematics education, this book particularly evidences growing
African confidence and imagination to tread pathways unfamiliar to historic colo-
nial systems, their successors, and modern empires. For example, we see a develop-
ing embrace of place-based mathematics and of competency-based curricula, which,
for all their limitations and unexpected challenges, offer opportunities for schools
and teachers to re-focus on core purposes of education, and with that, on the devel-
opment of key affective and process characteristics, as well as the core cognitive
skills, though not necessarily the same types of procedural knowledge, needed in a
pre-digital age.
This book provides ample evidence of the potential of educators across
Africa for creativity, imagination, and solution focus in education. Because of its
geo-location, Africa has comparatively low domestic energy needs and a high
potential for, e.g. solar energy. When many Western societies are experiencing frag-
mentation of family and neighbourhood structures and inter-dependabilities, and
global super-economies, e.g. China and India are leading the production of the
material wealth that underpins such aspirations, much of Africa enjoys strong fam-
ily- and roots-based cultures that can lend stability to a society that has enough to
sustain life. Does Africa also have the wisdom, and the capacity, to resist ‘first
world’ narratives of ever-increasing consumption and people-centredness? This
book offers hope that, if policymakers let them, teachers and teacher educators in
Africa have the imagination and the determination to develop mathematics and
wider education that will equip for wisdom to discern what is needed for human
flourishing and the courage to pursue and even to lead, that.
University College London Jennie Golding
London, UK
References
Golding, J., & Lyakhova, S. (2021). School mathematics education and digital technologies: A
discussion paper. Joint Mathematical Council of the United Kingdom. https://www.jmc.org.
uk/2021/11/03/517/
Jones, K., & Ng, O. L. (2021). The fourth industrial revolution is dangerous marketing hype: how
educators, working with all stakeholders, can transform the teaching and learning of mathemat-
ics. In Prasitha, M., Changsri, N., & Boonsena (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th conference of
the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education, Vol. 1, pp. 67–75. PME.
Schwab, K. (2016). The fourth industrial revolution. World Economic Forum.
Preface
The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is a process and an event that has evolved
into utilising new technologies. It is characterised by the fusion of the biological,
physical, and digital worlds. The 4IR has created an interconnected, unpredictable,
disruptive, and complex world full of new digital technologies. It embodies a new
era of innovation in mathematics education, leading to the rapid emergence of new
mathematics teaching and learning technologies. Thus, this edited volume focuses
on mathematics teaching and learning in Africa in the 4IR.
The 4IR in mathematics education is happening in various parts of Africa at var-
ied levels, locations, and entities. The authors of the various chapters in this volume
have positioned the 4IR research in their respective local contexts. They have
addressed numerous interests, concerns, and implications regarding Mathematics
Education and 4IR in Africa. A number of authors have positioned their work in the
context of the COVID-19 pandemic that has gripped the world, while others have
situated their discussions on the implications of inequalities in Africa on mathemat-
ics education in the 4IR. Some of the chapters have hinged on arguments, observa-
tions, and suggestions on how mathematics teaching and learning in Africa can be
conducted, improved, and transformed by 4IR, especially its Internet of Things
(IoT). There are also chapters that have focused on challenges associated with 4IR
in mathematics education in Africa.
In bringing together the chapters in this book, we provide a research-based
resource for graduate students, mathematics teachers, mathematics education cur-
riculum developers and policymakers, research enthusiasts, and everyone interested
in Mathematics Education and the 4IR at various levels of education in Africa. The
book is a rich source of information on research in mathematics education and the
4IR for the international communities interested in education issues in Africa.
Cape Town, South Africa Brantina Chirinda
Johannesburg, South Africa Kakoma Luneta
Kigali, Rwanda Alphonse Uworwabayeho

ix
Contents
1 Is Africa Ready for the Fourth Industrial Revolution? . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Fidele Ukobizaba, Ezechiel Nsabayezu,
and Alphonse Uworwabayeho
2 Can the Fourth Industrial Revolution Resolve Why the
Teaching of Mathematics in the Current Paradigm
Continues to Be Decontextualised and Ineffective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Kakoma Luneta
3 Alignment and Gaps of the Competency- Based
Mathematics Curriculum and the Fourth Industrial Revolution. . . . 39
Mary A. Ochieng and Penina Kamina
4 Mathematics Educators’ Readiness for Online Education
in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: A Case of
Two Selected Universities in Ethiopia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
France Machaba and Tola Bekene Bedada
5 Mathematics Education and the Fourth Industrial Revolution:
Are the High School Mathematics Teachers Ready? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Musa A. Ayanwale, Mdutshekelwa Ndlovu, and Jumoke I. Oladele
6 Transforming the Zimbabwean Secondary School
Mathematics Curriculum to Align It with the Demands
of the Fourth Industrial Revolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
Gladys Sunzuma, Brantina Chirinda, and Conilius Chagwiza
7 Mathematics Teachers’ Self-Efficacy in Using
Problem-Based Learning for the Fourth Industrial Revolution . . . . . 115
Aline Dorimana, Alphonse Uworwabayeho, and Gabriel Nizeyimana
8 Computer Adaptive-Based Learning and Assessment
for Enhancing STEM Education in Africa:
A Fourth Industrial Revolution Possibility . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131
Jumoke I. Oladele, Mdutshekelwa Ndlovu, and Musa A. Ayanwale
xi