ED1415, Mathematics culture and technology

For number of researchers (Bishop 1988,Clarkson,fitzSimon & Seah 1999, Knijnik 2002), most people tend to see Mathematis as a culture n value free discipline. These authors suggests, each one inn their way, that failures and difficulties regarding Mathematics at school are usually ascribed to the students cognitive's attributes or to the quality of the teaching to which they are submitted.

Thus social aspects and especially cultural aspects, have received insufficient consideration in the teaching and learning of mathematics. From the 1980's however, one can observe a gradual change in teaching mathematics in particular in countries notably marked by multiethnic population (e.g. Abreu, Bishop & Presmeg 2002), concerning a socio cultural issues. Kietel,Demerow, Bishop&Gerdes 1989, show how the social dimension has been affecting mathematics education research and consequently, clarifying the cultural nature of mathematical knowing. According to Bishop 1997,such a dimension stimulates research at five main levels :

1) individual level ; which is concerned with personal learning in and out of classroom
2) pedagogical level :concerned with social interactions in maths classroom
3)institutional level : concerned with social norms and interctions within schools which influence the teaching of mathematics in classroom.
4)societal level ; concerned with the relationship between mathematical educations and society
5)cultural level ; concerned with relationships between mathematical educations and historical cultural context of the society


In r elation to the last level Bishop, Bishops argues that situations of cultural conflicts strongly involve emotional and affective reactions by the students. This has led him to an interest in exploring relationships between affect and culture in terms of teachers' values and students' affect. Based on the literature of the anthropology, Bishops has introduced the comcepts of enculturation ( Bishop 1988) and acculturation ( Bishop 2002) in Mathematics education. He argues that both concepts are intensively linked to the teachers' values in relations to mathematics. Further the author suggests that the mathematic educations that can rely on experiences of enculturation or acculturation, influencing thus 2 effective dimensions of the students' learning. Enculturation is the induction by a particular cultural group of young people into their culture, whereas acculturation refers to the induction into an outside culture by an outside agent.

For Bishop, often, Mathematics is a Pan- human phenomenon in a sense that it consist of 6 fundamental activities that seems to be employed by a number of cultural groups already studied.These activities are counting, measuring,locating, designing,playing and explaining. Bishop ideas about the pan-cultural nature of mathematical activity were developed prior to his later educational analysis using perspective of enculturation.This perspective presupposes the existence of cultural harmony between the school mathematics and the culture students bring from home. However along the development of his works, (Bishop 1994), the author re-evaluates his premises aiming at the understanding of cultural conflicts. From these Bishop return his research towards the hypothesis that mathematic educations may not be a process of enculturation but instead a process of acculturation.

reference : URl add : http://www.mes5.learning.aau.dk/Papers/Frade_Faria.pdf



Mathematics frontier of technologies


The develop world is full of modern technology that we take for granted. Mobile phones, Credit cards, internet, CD and DVD's are only a few examples of innovations that have revolutinized everyday life in the past thirty years. Common to all these is that thier function is depend heavily on mathematics. Another thing is that most of these cases, the mathematics are not invented for the sake of technological inventions. it had already been developed as pure mathematics and lay ready to be applied when the time is ripe..

reference : URL add : http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/content/view/385/640/


MATHEMATICS,CULTURE AND POWER

here one articles about Ethnomathematics.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/749794