With Nepal’s multi-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic society, Dr. Bal Chandra Luitel describes how this asset can be used to promote inclusivity in higher education. Afterwards, he discusses how student mobility will affect the country’s human capital in the coming years.
Bal Chandra Luitel is a professor at Kathmandu University, educated in Nepal and Australia. Luitel’s expertise as a transformative education researcher lies in employing multi-paradigmatic research design for portraying the problem of culturally decontextualized mathematics and science education, a protracted problem that poses a serious challenge towards an inclusive and life affirming mathematics and science education in Nepal, a country that hosts more than 92 language groups and different cultural traditions arising from Vedic, Buddhist and Animist belief systems. Luitel has been working with a number of Nepali teachers and teacher educators who examine their lived experiences as students, teachers and teacher educators, thereby developing visions for fostering experiences of meaningful mathematical learning among their students. In this process, Luitel’s research program enables education researchers to engage with a host of research paradigms together with new analytics arising from dialectical, metaphorical, poetic and narrative logics and genres as a means for conceiving, expressing and implementing visions of an inclusive and life-affirming mathematics and science education in Nepal.