Paulus Gerdes’ Reflections on Ethnomathematics was my first ever encounter with the subject of ethnomathematics (1994). It was a short read, but it was a good start to get immersed into this totally different view of mathematics. Like myself, I learned that the whole world thought for a long time that math was the same for all cultures, and the idea of identifying the different mathematics practiced by different cultural groups like tribal societies, labor groups, children of the same age bracket, professional classes, etc. only started in the 1970’s to 1980’s when U D’ Ambrosio an ethnomathematical program and coined the term ethnomathematics himself.
Mathematics, apparently, is not only the math that we learn from school. There is indigenous mathematics, application of mathematics in African people’s lives, informal mathematics, mathematics even in games and craftwork, spontaneous math, non-standard mathematics that differs from the established rules in standard mathematics, hidden or lost mathematics, and even oppressed mathematics that used to exist in third world countries but were not recognized by the dominant ideology. (Gerdes, 1994)
So far, I have learned from this paper that ethomathematics is also a “research field studying mathematics and mathematical ideas in its context in culture and society” (Gerdes, 1994). In fact, there have been a lot of researches written about the subject, some of which refer to specific ways that mathematics has been a part of lives of Africans.
It has almost been half a century since the increasing interest in ethnomathematics first started, but still, schools in the Philippines and Australia (and probably even in other countries) still use math textbooks that have math problems that seem to have come from nowhere and don’t apply to the specific students’ real life. Consider the following sample problem taken from an uncorrected Oxford Maths book for year 6 in Australia.
(Murray, 2018)
Students who have no idea what “overseas” is will probably just ignore the term and just answer this question by extracting the given numbers from the words in the problem and operating on them. Since this question falls under the multiplication chapter in the book, the students will simply multiply six and 3078. They may be able to answer this correctly, but that does not mean they have understood how multiplication works in real life. This is why some people could be good in “street maths” like the vendors in third world countries who can accurately give a change mentally, but struggle in school maths. And this is also why some people can be so good in doing algorithms on paper but can’t translate the learning to real life.
So how do we apply “cultural conscientialization” in teaching mathematics and integrate cultural elements in our lessons to cater to the diverse needs of students at primary level? So far, I have learned that to do this, we need to know more about our students and their culture. It’s easy to say that if you have Chinese students, then teach them using problems that have Chinese references. But is that as simple as that? Do we just make them solve how many chopsticks do 24 people need and that’s it? Do we simply ask children of farmers how much fertilizer to put for 2 square meters of land and that’s it?
Applying the learnings from ethnomathematics in the school context is more challenging than this I believe. But giving problems that students of different backgrounds can relate to is a good start. When I used to tutor primary school students, I would ask them first what their favourite cartoon character is. Then I design a problem using that cartoon character as a person in the problem. But what if the students don’t have TV and don’t know any cartoon characters? How do we teachers engage them if we don’t anything about their culture? Teaching mathematics in Australia also means digging deeper into the cultures that exist in this country. Now I see why a foreigner teacher or any teacher in that case cannot just teach math without learning first about the aboriginal culture, the culture of the Torres Strait Islanders and even the culture of the migrants that are studying in schools, too.
I hope to learn more specific strategies in contextualising learning using ethnomathematics as I read other papers about this topic. I also hope to find a mathematician, teacher or researcher who could contribute more on the their experiences with applications of ethnomathematics in mathematics pedagogy.
References:
Gerdes, P. (1994). Reflections on Ethnomathematics. For the learning of mathematics, 14(2), 19-22.
Murray, B. (2018). Oxford Maths Practics and Mastery Book. Australia: Oxford.
Ethnomathematics 