Acknowledgement of Reviewers’ Contribution

The Journal of Transformative Praxis is a collaborative venture between Tribhuvan University (TU), Kathmandu University (KU), and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). The Editorial Board of the Journal would like to appreciate their contributions to the following reviewers for their scholarly efforts in reviewing manuscripts submitted to the JrTP.

Autoethnography: Writing Lives and Telling Stories

Autoethnography covers a wide range of narrative representations, thereby bridging the gap of the boundaries by expressing autoethnographers’ painful and gainful lived experiences. These representations arise from local stories, vignettes, dialogues, and role plays by unfolding action, reaction, and interaction in the form of self-narration. Likewise, the autoethnographic texts must exhibit the autoethnographers’ critical reflections on the overall process of the inquiry. These exhibitions shall alert the autoethnographers’ research ethics, reflexivity, alternative modes of representation, inquiry, and storytelling. The original articles in this issue that rises from the domain of critical social theories within the various ranges of theoretical perspectives include journeying through informing, reforming, and transforming teacher education; critical ethnographic research tradition; a critical and political reading of the excerpts of myths; climate change education and its interface with indigenous knowledge and general traits of the participants as transformed teachers.

Journeying Through Informing, Reforming and Transforming Teacher Education: Reflections on Curriculum Images

This paper aims to address ‘how an auto/ethnographic muse explores informing, reforming and transforming states of teacher education and research practices.’ I critique informing and reforming states of teacher education in Pakistan for the limitations associated with these approaches rooted within the colonial system of education. Within these two approaches to education, I share the experiences of teaching, learning, research practices, and beliefs, which could not address a broader view of teacher education. To address the research problem, I applied an unconventional approach to research by using auto/ethnography as a methodological referent within a multi-paradigmatic research design space. In so doing, I used the paradigms of interpretivism, criticalism, postmodernism, and integralism as data referents, which enabled me to capture the lived experiences of my professional lifeworld at different stages. Moreover, I used critical reflections on the experiences as a teacher, teacher educator, and researcher as epistemic techniques to explore, explain and construct meaning out of the perceptions, beliefs, and practices. Perhaps, engaging autobiographically as an approach to knowing deep-seated views and practices and critically reflecting on the embodied values of practices open new ways of being and becoming a transformative learner(s). This paper invites readers to reflect critically on their own deep-seated practices by using such unconventional approaches to research that would enable them to experience a paradigm shift in their thinking, believing, viewing, and doing. I believe that in doing so, practitioners as researchers, with their own embodied values of practice in their professional lives, can transform self/others by creating their own living-educational-theories.

Mythic Content as a Rhetoric in Government-aided School Textbooks of Nepal

This paper offers a critical and political reading of the excerpts of myths included in government-sponsored school-level language textbooks of Nepal, and looks at how the content is more prone to instilling particular values than to teaching skills of language competence. Drawing on insights and postulations from Critical Discourse Analysis in general, and dispositive analysis in particular, it examines values embedded in the excerpts as a discursive site for the practice of knowledge-making and power. Given that textbooks are a cultural production at large, and therefore textual, the paper explores how the reproduction of mythical content has given rise to the pedagogy that serves the teleological purpose of producing the desired type of possible citizenry by keeping the essentialities of modern education such as critical engagement, linguistic and cognitive skills, the questioning attitude and critical thinking at the disposal. The paper concludes that the particular way of designation of the content is likely to halt the basic aim of producing the learners as active and critical social agents for the broader social transformation, and calls for a revisit to mitigate the gap between the professed objectives and their materialization in language textbooks and make the learning content more goal-oriented.

Mangsukas Indigenous Knowledge Heritage in Yamphu Community: An Estranged Transformative Learning Space

Based on a critical ethnographic research tradition, this paper explores how Mangsuk as an indigenous institution represents a space for cultural-self and relational knowing in the Yamphu indigenous community of Ambote village of Ilam district of eastern Nepal. The paper explores the beliefs, worldviews, and practices of Mangsuk that pass on to adults and children in the community. The paper argues that Mangsuk, as a cultural institution, shapes the emotions, sense of self, particular beliefs, and behaviors among the community people. It further highlights the Mundhum (an oral tradition) associated with the Mangsuk ritual to transfer Yamphu indigenous knowledge, communal values, beliefs, emotionality, spirituality, and worldviews among the kins in the community. Furthermore, the paper portrays how modern education has been side-lining the indigenous ways of transformative learning (cultural self-knowing and relational knowing), resulting in the relegation of indigenous knowledge heritage.

Climate Change Education through Narrative Inquiry

This article addresses Climate Change Education (CCE) and its interface with Indigenous knowledge. Specifically, I explore the potential for transformation towards more holistic climate change education that balances science and Indigenous knowledge. However, the study details the persistent focus of contemporary education on climate science without interfacing with Indigenous knowledge, cultural values, and associated practices that contribute to climate change resilience. This article tackles this gap and the requisite transformation in climate change education through narrative inquiry.

More than a 'Jágir': Representation of Transformative Ethos in English Teachers’ Solicited Reflections

This article is based on a generative reading of six English teachers’ solicited responses to reflective questions framed by undergraduate students of science, engineering and management in Kathmandu University. The reading unfolds four aspects of ethos in the participants – spontaneity, specialties, specialization and stability – and six frames of reference corresponding with the transformative journey of each participant – teaching is living, made for teaching, making things happen, empowering female students, performing the ideal image and positioned in the opposition. The paper further infers three general traits of the participants as transformed teachers: first, the personality that transcends grumbling and regretting for trivial lacunae involved in the field of teaching; second, the portrayal of a positive picture of teaching as a gifted field; and third, empathy for the students and emphasis on their responsibility of bringing positive changes in students’ lives and in the society at large.

Connecting Ethnomathematics to the Concept of Positive Deviance

An impasse in mathematics education is related to its frequent lack of acknowledgment of local mathematical practices in its research theoretical basis. Pedagogical action of ethnomathematics aids in recording cultural-historical forms of mathematical procedures and practices developed by members of distinct cultural groups. Ethnomathematics is a form of push back from colonization without attempting to replace academic mathematics. Hence, a sense of insubordination triggered by ethnomathematics is creative and often evokes a sense of disturbance that causes a conscious review of rules and regulations endemic to many curricular and educational research contexts. This process enables educators and investigators to adopt positive deviance in developing pedagogical actions that deal with content usually disconnected from the reality of the students in order to deal with imposed norms and rules. Thus, positive deviance involves an intentional act of bending the rules in order to serve the greater good of the school communities.

Holistic Orientation in Education: Transformative Art of Including, Connecting and Balancing

This study explores holistic orientation in education reflecting on practice-based accounts of educators with emerging pedagogical insights and implication conceptualized within transformative learning theory. Similarly, this study explores holistic orientation in education with a reflective praxis that advances collaborative self-narrative research incorporating personal reflections of educators seeking to nurture transformed ways of including, connecting and balancing in their pedagogical practices. In this study, educators with holistic orientations place emphasis on inner lives, balance, exploring dynamics of interconnections, trustful and authentic relationships, dialogues, concern and care as transformative initiatives in their pedagogical practices. Based on the guiding metaphor that what you see depends upon how you look, this article offers both descriptive and reflective insights into pedagogical reflections of educators that exemplify holistic orientations as a practical implication for transformative learning. The findings of this article indicate holistic orientations in education as a resonance educators experience and explore between why they teach and how they teach. More importantly, together with further implications for transformative research and education policy, this study aims to recreate possibilities for transforming educational practices with transformed ways of being, balancing, and relating of educators.

Connecting Mathematics Education to my Relationship with the Cosmos

I believe that human beings are closely interconnected to the cosmos in which we exist. Today, we hear a lot about caring for the Mother Earth. More and more humans are coming to realize the need to protect our environment and to stop the uncontrolled exploitation of the nature. With the exploration of the space, we have also come to understand that we are only a tiny particle in this vast cosmos. As a result, we are responsible towards the cosmos that surrounds us and in which we are part of. Often mathematics teaching-learning has been limited to the cognitive level and very seldom concerns of the ecology and issues related to the cosmos are brought up in mathematics classrooms. My mathematics teaching-learning life was no exception as there was hardly any connection to my relationship with the cosmos. Through this autoethnographic study, I show how mathematics teaching-learning needs to and can take into consideration the important relationship and responsibility we have towards the environment, universe and the cosmos and how we can teach pro-cosmological behaviours to our students through topics in mathematics they are learning. This will be done by narrating my lived experiences of missing the link with the cosmos in my mathematics classrooms both as a student and a teacher and by presenting a few examples of making mathematics teaching-learning cosmologically responsible in classrooms.