Ethnomathematics and its Diverse Approaches for Mathematics Education


Book Description

This book addresses numerous issues related to ethnomathematics and diverse approaches to it in the context of mathematics education. To help readers better understand the development of ethnomathematics, it discusses its objectives and assumptions with regard to promoting an ethics of respect, solidarity, and cooperation across and for all cultures. In turn, the book addresses a range of aspects including pedagogical action, culturally relevant pedagogy, innovative approaches to ethnomathematics, and the role of ethnomathematics in mathematics education. Ethnomathematics offers educators a valuable framework for transforming mathematics so that it can more actively contribute to realizing the dream of a just and humane society. As such, its primary goal is to forge mathematics into a powerful tool to help people create a society characterized by dignity for all, and in which iniquity, arrogance, violence, and bigotry have no place.




Ethnomathematics


Book Description

Presents the emerging field of ethnomathematics from a critical perspective, challenging particular ways in which Eurocentrism permeates mathematics education and mathematics in general.




Applying Critical Mathematics Education


Book Description

This volume showcases new insights, teaching ideas and new and unique ways of applying critical mathematics education, in areas as diverse as climate change, obesity, decolonisation and ethnomathematics.




Critical Mathematics Education


Book Description

Mathematics is traditionally seen as the most neutral of disciplines, the furthest removed from the arguments and controversy of politics and social life. However, critical mathematics challenges these assumptions and actively attacks the idea that mathematics is pure, objective, and value?neutral. It argues that history, society, and politics have shaped mathematics—not only through its applications and uses but also through molding its concepts, methods, and even mathematical truth and proof, the very means of establishing truth. Critical mathematics education also attacks the neutrality of the teaching and learning of mathematics, showing how these are value?laden activities indissolubly linked to social and political life. Instead, it argues that the values of openness, dialogicality, criticality towards received opinion, empowerment of the learner, and social/political engagement and citizenship are necessary dimensions of the teaching and learning of mathematics, if it is to contribute towards democracy and social justice. This book draws together critical theoretic contributions on mathematics and mathematics education from leading researchers in the field. Recurring themes include: The natures of mathematics and critical mathematics education, issues of epistemology and ethics; Ideology, the hegemony of mathematics, ethnomathematics, and real?life education; Capitalism, globalization, politics, social class, habitus, citizenship and equity. The book demonstrates the links between these themes and the discipline of mathematics, and its critical teaching and learning. The outcome is a groundbreaking collection unified by a shared concern with critical perspectives of mathematics and education, and of the ways they impact on practice.




Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education


Book Description

The Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education is a comprehensive reference text, covering every topic in the field with entries ranging from short descriptions to much longer pieces where the topic warrants more elaboration. The entries provide access to theories and to research in the area and refer to the leading publications for further reading. The Encyclopedia is aimed at graduate students, researchers, curriculum developers, policy makers, and others with interests in the field of mathematics education. It is planned to be 700 pages in length in its hard copy form but the text will subsequently be up-dated and developed on-line in a way that retains the integrity of the ideas, the responsibility for which will be in the hands of the Editor-in-Chief and the Editorial Board. This second edition will include additional entries on: new ideas in the politics of mathematics education, working with minority students, mathematics and art, other cross-disciplinary studies, studies in emotions and mathematics, new frameworks for analysis of mathematics classrooms, and using simulations in mathematics teacher education. Existing entries will be revised and new entries written. Members of the international mathematics education research community will be invited to propose new entries. Editorial Board: Bharath Sriraman Melony Graven Yoshinori Shimizu Ruhama Even Michele Artigue Eva Jablonka Wish to Become an Author? Springer's Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education's first edition was published in 2014. The Encyclopedia is a "living" project and will continue to accept articles online as part of an eventual second edition. Articles will be peer-reviewed in a timely manner and, if found acceptable, will be immediately published online. Suggested articles are, of course, welcome. Feel encouraged to think about additional topics that we overlooked the first time around, and to suggest colleagues (including yourself!) who will want to write them. Interested new authors should contact the editor in chief, Stephen Lerman, at [email protected], for more specific instructions.




Ethnomathematics


Book Description

In this truly one-of-a-kind book, Ascher introduces the mathematical ideas of people in traditional, or "small-scale", cultures often omitted from discussion of mathematics. Topics such as "Numbers: Words and Symbols", "Tracing Graphs in the Sand", "The Logic of Kin Relations", "Chance and Strategy in Games and Puzzles", and "The Organization and Modeling of Space" are traced in various cultures including the Inuit, Navajo, and Iroquois of North America; the Inca of South America; the Malekula, Warlpiri, Maori, and Caroline Islanders of Oceania, and the Tshokwe, Bushoong, and Kpelle of Africa. As Ascher explores mathematical ideas involving numbers, logic, spatial configuration, and the organization of these into systems and structures, readers gain both a broader understanding and anappreciation for the idease of other peoples.




Visuospatial Reasoning


Book Description

This book develops the theoretical perspective on visuospatial reasoning in ecocultural contexts, granting insights on how the language, gestures, and representations of different cultures reflect visuospatial reasoning in context. For a number of years, two themes in the field of mathematics education have run parallel with each other with only a passing acquaintance. These two areas are the psychological perspective on visuospatial reasoning and ecocultural perspectives on mathematics education. This volume examines both areas of research and explores the intersection of these powerful ideas. In addition, there has been a growing interest in sociocultural aspects of education and in particular that of Indigenous education in the field of mathematics education. There has not, however, been a sound analysis of how environmental and cultural contexts impact visuospatial reasoning, although it was noted as far back as the 1980s when Alan Bishop developed his duality of visual processing and interpreting visual information. This book provides this analysis and in so doing not only articulates new and worthwhile lines of research, but also uncovers and makes real a variety of useful professional approaches in teaching school mathematics. With a renewed interest in visuospatial reasoning in the mathematics education community, this volume is extremely timely and adds significantly to current literature on the topic.







Handbook of Cognitive Mathematics


Book Description

Cognitive mathematics provides insights into how mathematics works inside the brain and how it is interconnected with other faculties through so-called blending and other associative processes. This handbook is the first large collection of various aspects of cognitive mathematics to be amassed into a single title, covering decades of connection between mathematics and other figurative processes as they manifest themselves in language, art, and even algorithms. It will be of use to anyone working in math cognition and education, with each section of the handbook edited by an international leader in that field.




Ethnomathematics in Action


Book Description

This book presents a collection of ethnomathematical studies of diverse mathematical practices in Afro-Brazilian, indigenous, rural and urban communities in Brazil. Ethnomathematics as a research program aims to investigate the interrelationships of local mathematical knowledge sources with broader universal forms of mathematics to understand ideas, procedures, and practices found in distinct cultural groups. Based on this approach, the studies brought together in this volume show how this research program is applied and practiced in a culturally diverse country such as Brazil, where African, indigenous and European cultures have generated different forms of mathematical practice. These studies present ethnomathematics in action, as a tool to connect the study of mathematics with the students’ real life experiences, foster critical thinking and develop a mathematics curriculum which incorporates contributions from different cultural groups to enrich mathematical knowledge. By doing so, this volume shows how ethnomathematics can contribute in practice to the development of a decolonial mathematics education. Ethnomathematics in Action: Mathematical Practices in Brazilian Indigenous, Urban and Afro Communities will be of interest to educators and educational researchers looking for innovative approaches to develop a more inclusive, democratic, critical, multicultural and multiethnic mathematics education.