The relevance of mathematics and students’ identities (original) (raw)
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The International Study Group on Ethnomathematics (ISGEm) supports incorporating cultural diversity of mathematical practices to promote the teaching and learning of school mathematics. Through The Mathematics Heritage Project, students at a middle school in the southeastern United States developed unique creations to connect with the mathematics connected to their identities and self-identified cultural group. Upon reflection, students reported an increased awareness of the relevance of mathematics in their lives and a sense of ownership that is both meaningful and modern.
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Drawing on data from 120 interviews with secondary schools students of mathematics aged from 14 to 18 in England and the United States, this paper argues that young people's developing identities are an important and neglected factor in success at secondary school mathematics. Students in both countries believe mathematics to be rigid and inflexible, and in particular, that it is a subject that leaves no room for negotiation of meaning. However, while the lack of opportunity for understanding mathematics was important, a much more salient factor in determining students' attitudes towards mathematics was that they did not see success at mathematics as in any way relevant to their developing identities, except insofar as success at mathematics allowed access to future education and careers. (Author) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
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In this article, I explore and elaborate the relation between goals, identities, and learning and argue for their utility as a model by which to understand the nature of learning in general and to better understand the way in which race, culture, and learning become intertwined for minority students in American schools. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives on learning and development, including Wenger (1998) and Saxe (1999), I describe findings from 2 studies of learning among African American students outside of school, in the cultural practices of dominoes and basketball. This research shows that indeed, as players come to learn these practices, they both shift in regard to the goals they seek to accomplish within the practice and change as they come to define themselves vis-à-vis the practice. The implications for understanding the relation between race, culture, and learning are discussed. The relation between culture, race, and mathematics learning has increasingly been of interest to the mathematics education community. One approach to this topic has been to compare the mathematics achievement of different racial groups. Studies from this perspective have repeatedly indicated that African American and Latino students score lower on tests of mathematical knowledge (
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Everyday Mathematics in Ethiopia: The Case of the Khimra People Hilluf Reddu Doctor of Philosophy in Mathematics Education Addis Ababa University, 2015 The issue of connecting school mathematics contents and instruction to the learners’ socio-cultural and real life context is increasingly attracting the attention of educational practitioners including teachers and students themselves. The overall aim of the current study was to investigate the everyday mathematical practice and the issue of connecting in-and out-of-school mathematical practices. Guided by the desire of adding empirical knowledge, the present study examined this issue in one of Ethiopia’s ethnic groups, the Khimra people. The study was conducted in eight workplaces, two games, and two schools selected purposively. Twenty five informants were purposively selected from these workplaces, games, and schools. The study used a qualitative multiple (embedded) case study design to address the problem of connecting workplace ...
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During the past few decades, identity has emerged as a key to studying the sociocultural and sociopolitical character of mathematics learning and teaching and has been linked directly to conceptualizations of mathematical proficiency. Along with the attentiveness to issues of identity, mathematics education researchers have also begun to “take power seriously” in an effort to better understand the ways in which students’ mathematics-specific learning experiences are framed in- and outside of the classroom, by what and by whom, and with what consequences. In this paper, I discuss the recent social- and sociopolitical-turn moments in mathematics education as context for the emergence of identity as an analytic tool. To touch on how issues of identity and power intersect and are being taken up, I draw on a recent study that examined the identities of students who were enrolled in a non-credit-bearing remedial mathematics course as they transitioned from high school- to college-level mathematics.
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In this symposium, we argue that a deeper understanding of what impacts on teaching and learning in mathematics education can be gained by foregrounding the concept of identity and exploring its explanatory potential. In this paper we provide on overview of identity and introduce a scenario from mathematics preservice teacher education that is then interpreted from three theoretical perspectives in the papers that follow.
Negotiating the Relevant in Culturally Relevant Mathematics
Canadian Journal of Science, …, 2011
One approach to promoting successful engagement of underrepresented groups in mathematics classrooms is Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP). However, it has been argued that CRP risks essentializing students or watering down academic content. We report our analysis of a case study of a group of three 6 th grade students who took part in a 6-week mathematics curriculum. This curriculum used Geographical Information System (GIS) maps to engage students in designing personally meaningful research projects while learning about measures of central tendency (i.e., learning statistics). The case study was chosen as representative of how students in this urban classroom (47 total) successfully navigated the curriculum. While successful, the intervention highlights the kinds of negotiations that students engaged in with each other, the teacher, and the curriculum as they co-constructed their own meaning of relevance. The goal of our analysis is to illustrate the importance of recognizing multiple forms of relevance and supporting ongoing negotiations of these multiple forms.
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It is my observation that the current school mathematics curriculum in Ethiopia is not producing competent mathematics students. Many mathematicians in Ethiopia and other part of the world have often expressed grief that the majority of students do not understand mathematical concepts, or do not see why mathematical procedures work, or do not know when to use a given mathematical technique (Cuoco, A.1995). According to Cuoco, A.A, et.al. (1996) for generations, school students have studied something in school that has been called mathematics but has very little to do with the way mathematics is created. Much of the failure in school mathematics is due to the tradition of the curriculum design and inappropriate teaching to the way student learns (National Research Council 1989). The mathematics curriculum has a great influence on how teachers teach in a classroom. In a traditional curriculum where a traditional teaching model is being employed a teacher demonstrates an algorithm or t...