Week 10 Readings: Math & Traditional and Contemporary Practices of Making and Doing

Reference: Kallis, S. (2014). Common threads: Weaving community through collaborative eco-art. New Society Publishers. 

Summary: In this excerpt from Kallis, she poses questions about a future where we centralize our society on producing for ourselves once again - a means to shelter, clothe and feed ourselves. The movement requires a different set of values and ways of thinking that brings consciousness, self-esteem and empowerment.

I see value in so many of the things Kallis writes in her book. Here are a few that connect personally:

"From outsourcing to local factories, then national factories, and finally to developing nations, we have happily divested the responsibility of taking care of ourselves" (Kallis, 2014, p. 21).

"...the process of meeting our own needs provides opportunity for relearning lost skills; un-venting ancestral knowledge and technologies we are otherwise at risk of losing" (Kallis, 2014, p. 21).

"The act of learning to make for personal use what we have previously purchased is perhaps the most fundamentally important gift we as individuals can give to ourselves" (Kallis, 2014, p. 21). 

"...we must find ways to see change from the perspective of what we are gaining (strengthened community resources), not what is being lost (ease of global consumerism). ...No matter how truthful what is being said, environmental doomsday lectures scare many people away" (Kallis, 2014, p. 22). 

This way of thinking has been abandoned in favour of cheap and easy influenced greatly by a much faster-paced lifestyle. Unless these arts of clothing oneself is a hobby that you can invest countless hours into outside of your 'normal life', we're giving into the abundance of availability of potentially cheap and easy. 

These ideas of being self-sufficient with my own hands have crossed by mind many times in my life, and I have always been attracted to hand-made crafts found in local markets with artisans. A few places that really piqued my interest has been Granville Island shops, Saturday-morning markets in Penticton and more recently, Etsy! The ideas in Vogelstein et al (2019) about foraging, dissecting and re-enacting (or recreating in my case) is something I've done for fun given my self-imposed financial constraint I discussed in a previous post.

A bustling market in Japan full of hand-made items (Photo: Oliver Podwysocki).

I've always wanted to participate in a Christmas market (Photo: Oliver Podwysocki).

I wanted to learn leatherwork to be able to develop skills with these materials and tools. Then, I realized that outside of making durable clothing items and gear, I could make shoes! Shoes being an absolute necessity in our daily life, developing skills of a cobbler was really exciting and I finished my first pair in 2023.

As described by Kallis, there is a sense of heightened self-esteem (or better yet, self-efficacy) knowing that I can provide for myself (and family) and not need to rely on an external system. I have a goal of trying to learn all self-sustaining skills so that I will not need the consumer structures in place to - at the very least - clothe and feed myself and my family. 

This post doesn't have a central mathematical thread tying it to the rest of the course, but broadens the view of how we can provide opportunity to generate this kind of back-sourced (opposite of outsourced, as used by Kallis) thinking and doing to develop a healthier community, social identity and sense of self. Having these goals in mind should help to guide our choices to engineer experiences for our students (and self) by manipulating/modifying our local community environments in a way that will provide mathematical experiences that develop a healthier Western culture. 

Wonders: 

• Can we manipulate the pace of life so as to accommodate the production of self-made items? 
• What does the cyclical timeline look like for planting, harvesting and processing nettle, dogs bane and milkweed for cordage, rope, or spinning? (This I can google. I plan on using a seasonal round template to document these timelines in planning to develop a school community specifically for fibre arts).
• How many of these processes can happen within a semester?
  (ie. deciding on crop, planting, harvesting, processing, and creating)
  (ie. will the past semester need to "gift" the future semester with a decision of a crop-type such that the future semester can reap the benefits of crafting with it?)
• How can I develop a Pro-D workshop to teach my math department (who are VERY traditional) and colleagues to lead by example?
• Are there mathematical papers that demonstrate these inherent principles that can help justify these choices to administration, parents and - most importantly - my (traditional-math) students, similarly to Bohr & Olsen (2011) and Astrom & Astrom (2021)? 

That's all for now.