Cultural Conflicts in Mathematics Education: Developing a Research Agenda.

Abstract

Research on ethnomathematics within the last ten years has opened up some new possibilities for developments in mathematics education, particularly in situations where conflicts potentially exist. In this paper I shall explore the culture conflict construct with a view to developing a possible research agenda. Up to ten years ago, mathematics was generally assumed to be culture-free and value-free knowledge; explanations of failure and difficulty in relation to school mathematics were sought either in terms of the learners' cognitive attributes or in terms of the quality of the teaching they received; there were several attempts to make mathematics teaching more affectively satisfactory to the learners, with few long term benefits; and and cultural issues in mathematics education research were rarely considered. Within the last ten years, there has been an increasing move to make mathematics accessible to all learners; there has been an increasing questioning of the relevance of excolonial models of education in developing countries, and in countries with indigenous minorities; the social dimension has come into greater prominence in research in mathematics education; and the nature of mathematical knowledge has become clearer to many mathematics educators [see Keitel et ai, 1989]. Three important research approaches are shaping the recent work on ethnomathematics, with the following foci: