A Call to Action: Teacher Education and its Relationship to Ethnomathematics
Maria do Carmo Domite - Brasil
Daniel Clark Orey - E.U.A.
Being that this is a working group on issues related to ethnomathematics, it seems redundant to present an exhaustive list of presuppositions and issues related to our area of study. We begin this discussion by focusing on the role of the teacher educator in relation to ethnomathematics by discussing Ubiratan D´Ambrosio´s alternatives which may lead us to a clearer understanding of this subject. He says,
Teachers and the public in general do not commonly say that mathematics and culture are connected. When teachers do acknowledge a connection, often they engage their students in multicultural activities merely as a curiosity. Such activities usually refer to a culture’s past and to cultures that are very remote from that of the children in the class. This situation occurs because teachers may not understand how culture relates to children and their learning (D’Ambrosio, 2001).
An exceedingly important component of mathematics education should provide teachers tools that enable them to “reaffirm, and in some instances to restore, the cultural dignity” of children. We speak here of more than transitional multicultural mathematics activities. Instead how can we assist, our students to experience multicultural mathematical activities that “reflect the knowledge and behaviors of people from diverse cultural environments”, so that they not only learn to value mathematics in general, but, just as importantly “may develop a greater respect for those who are different from themselves” (D’Ambrosio, 2001).
This means that even in seemingly ethnically homogenous environments there are diverse aspects of how mathematics is used in different historical contexts, work environments and social classes that can be worked into a given curriculum, and the effects of globalization and technology that have made enormous inroads. D’Ambrosio (2001) says,
Today’s children are living in a civilization that is dominated by mathematically-based technology and unprecedented means of communication. Much of the content of current mathematics programs does little to help students learn the information and skills necessary to function successfully in this new world.
Indeed, with any discussion of the relationship between teacher education and ethnomathematics we would need to look at how we might help teachers to establish cultural models or beliefs that connect to thought and behavior in the classroom. In this sense we are contemplating not only the potential pedagogical work that takes into account the “knowledge” of the students, but also of the nature of the learning that occurs outside school. An ethnomathematics perspective requires educators to rethink how and what is taught, by encouraging teachers to recognize that there is, in a sense “mathematics in everything”, not just the required school-based curriculum. How diverse people, despite their formal schooling experiences, actually come to learn, measure, classify, order and organize, infer, and model are all important aspects of diverse modes of teaching and learning of mathematics.
Teresi (2003) asks, “Are students adequately informed about non-western cultures?” He goes onto ask, that some researchers have noted that, often maintained the myth that, math is difficult enough to teach without having to add a global or multicultural perspective,
In many places in the world, it is hard enough to find good mathematics teachers without requiring them to know a spectrum, of western and non-western forms of math (Teresi, 2003).
This may in fact be the job of ethnomathematics – to stretch the limits of what we once perceived as mathematics (and its related thinking) and link this to what is known in other contexts. This is the fundamental job of an ethnomathematics-based pedagogy by making the practical from the theoretical happen in the classroom. To acquire these skills,
…while maintaining cultural dignity and to be prepared for full participation in society require more than what is offered in a traditional curriculum. Much of today’s curriculum is so disconnected from the child’s reality that it is impossible for the child to be a full participant in it. The mathematics in many classrooms has practically nothing to do with the world that the children are experiencing. Just as literacy has come to mean much more than reading and writing, mathematics must also be thought of as more than, and indeed different from, counting, calculating, sorting, or comparing (D’Ambrosio, 2002).
If the goal of mathematics education is, as D’Ambrosio states “to foster students’ ability to successfully use modern technology to solve problems and communicate their thinking they gain an awareness of the capabilities and limitations of technological instruments.” How does an ethnomathematics perspective support a cultural view of this assumption? It does so by acknowledging the importance of the culture of the student. In so doing it is teachers who must be given the opportunity to realize their own potential. Educators must come to recognize “the identity of the child and how culture affects how children think and learn” by learning themselves to value the diversity around them. By doing so, they are better able to teach children to value diversity in mathematics and to understand the influence that “culture has on mathematics and how this influence results in different ways in which mathematics is used and communicated” by diverse members of the human family.
Ethnomathematics encourages us to witness and struggle to understand how mathematics continues to be culturally adapted and used by people around the planet and throughout time. Traditionally in mathematics classrooms, the relevance of culture has been strangely absent from the content and instruction. The result is that many students and teachers unquestioningly believe that no connection exists between mathematics and culture. Failing to consider other possibilities, they believe that mathematics is acultural, a discipline without cultural significance (D’Ambrosio, 2001).
Mathematics as an acultural perspective is reflected during traditional instruction in several ways by D’Ambrosio:
1. In many classrooms, students are not permitted to construct personal understandings of the mathematics presented. The “values, traditions, beliefs, language, and habits reflective of the culture of the students are ignored”. In such situations, the ways that children might invent personally meaningful conceptualizations are not respected, often for reasons of curriculum and assessment expediency, and therefore “children are expected to assimilate prescribed procedures by rote without necessarily gaining a deeper and conceptually significant understanding of the mathematics that they are studying”.
2. An acultural mathematical curriculum also distorts the facts children learn about how mathematics has evolved over time, and who has contributed to this evolution. This highly inaccurate form of instruction has come to mislead children about the richness of mathematical history “and, to a degree, about the people who have populated this planet.”
Conclusion
It is our hope that the working group in ethnomathematics may indeed offer solutions for the way in which we might think about “walking the mystical way with practical feet”. That is the outlining of a model for the implementation of an ethnomathematical perspective in the way in which we train teachers to teach mathematic using ethnomathematics.
We can help teachers realize the mathematical potential of their students by helping them acknowledge the importance of culture in the identity of the child, and how culture affects how children think and learn mathematics. In so doing, we must find ways to teach teachers to value diversity in the mathematics classroom and to understand both the influences culture has on mathematics and how this influence results in different ways in which mathematics is used and communicated. We gain such an understanding through the study of the implementation of an ethnomathematics in teacher education.
Today, we too are playing a part in the evolution of the discipline of mathematics. It is time for educators to improve their understanding of the role that culture has played and continues to play in shaping mathematical development. It is time for educators to empower their students with this vital knowledge (D’Ambrosio, 2001).
Bibliography
D’Ambrosio, U. (2001). "What Is Ethnomathematics, and How Can it Help Children in Schools?" In: Teaching Children Mathematics, 7(6). Reston, VA: National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
Teresi, Dick. (2003). Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Moderns Science – from the Babylonians to the Maya. New York: Simon & Schuster.