Imagining Programming and Mathematics Education Otherwise

Abstract Several communities in the world have raised the urgency of questioning development and progress narratives and actions drawn on market-driven and competency rationales that largely have erased the diversity of the Earth, its human and non-human inhabitants. Attending to this urgency, this paper weaves two research stories, research conducted in grade 8 technology classrooms in a public school in Colombia and research work conducted with Colombian Nasa Indigenous communities. Working with the notion of diffractive apparatus, which is framed within an agential realism philosophical perspective, we think about the possibilities for programming and mathematics education that are connected to matters of care for the Earth that could build the path towards the pluriverse. To weave these stories, a diffractive methodology was enacted through which three propositions were generated, unfolded, and elaborated. First, the narrative of programming as essential for the world and the future was challenged by tracing entanglements that show how programming and mathematics emerged as a weapon of domination and competition. Second, the way in which students come to be in the classroom and in the world, attending to the logic of industrial growth and modernization was questioned, and finally, it was acknowledged that by centring the conversation around a politics of existence and re-existence to shelter the fabric of Uma Kiwe, other ways of doing, acting, being in the programming and mathematics classroom and in the world might emerge. The diffractive methodology is an ongoing thinking process to conceive programming and mathematics education entangled with matters of care for the Earth in a world that is yet to come.