Elastic Geometry and Storyknifing A Yup'ik Eskimo Example

Abstract

Storytelling occurs across cultures but is not generally thought of as having a mathematical component; nor are other everyday activities, such as shopping for groceries, packing for a trip, or making a quilt. Each of these informal activities, however, contains embedded mathematics; in Yup'ik Eskimo storyknifing, the forms etched illustrate a relationship between mathematics and ethnomathematics (see fig. 1). Children usually do not see the relationship between their surroundings and activities and mathematics. Connecting the intuitive, visual, and spatial components of storyknifing, as well as other everyday and ethnomathematical activities, with mathematical reasoning is a way to adapt, enrich, and enlarge the types of problems and processes that elementary school students face when learning mathematics.