Consideration of curriculum approaches of employing ethnomathematics in mathematics classroom

Abstract

Abstract As mentioned by many researchers (e.g., [1,2,3]), students have a belief that learning mathematics is formal and not flexible. Students are required to have fundamental mathematics skills which not only focus on memorizing the formula but also make sense of it. Recently, ethnomathematics is one of the promising approaches to help the students to explore their culture to get the idea of the mathematical concept. Though this ethnomathematics is well-known enough, ethnomathematics in the classroom seems superficial and only is used for the introduction part in the mathematics concept. In this paper, researchers try to review previous studies to identify the research gap and consider a new curriculum approach to fill the gap. Several existing approaches will be examined to develop a mathematical concept by overcoming superficial nature. Strength and weakness of them are identified. As a part of the consideration, an example will be given to strengthening the proposed curriculum.