Developing an alternative curriculum for mathematics teaching in a detention faculty adopting an ethnomathematics perspective

In Greece, as more or less all over the world, the curriculum is a matter of central authority and teachers can only apply it in their classrooms, without any connection to the whole curriculum development process. Students’ population in prison schools, and especially young prisoners, often show school denial, poor performance, academic inadequacy, and failure, leading to low self-esteem (Mallett, 2014). Common barriers to participation are lack of motivation —often because of the absence of any means for meaning-making and identity formation in prison— and previous negative education experiences (Liebling, 2011) especially in secondary school when they frequently begin to truant. Working, as teacher, for long time in the secondary school of a youth detention center in Greece, I faced the challenge to reconsider the formal curriculum. Following an ethnomathematics perspective, an alternative curriculum is developing aiming to meet young prisoners’ needs and expectations as a matter of social justice, taking into consideration the need of techniques and strategies that can help to untangle and respond to above structures as part of ongoing research, policy, and practice. The young detainees following the official curriculum applied in the mainstream classes are faced with various problems, such as lack of appropriate schoolbooks, the need to motivate and successfully address educational, psychological and environmental difficulties, and the need for developing a framework for alternative teaching practices and materials based on a multicultural education with the teaching and learning of mathematics, as is the case in the field of ethnomathematics is dictated.