ethnomathematics: legitimizing the link between mathematics and culture swapna mukhopadhyay graduate...

Ethnomathematics: Legitimizing the link

between Mathematics and Culture

Swapna MukhopadhyayGraduate School of EducationPortland State University

swapna@pdx.edu

Oregon NAME Conference Oregon State University, Corvallis,

OR.

Swapna MukhopadhyaySHOPNA

MUKHO-PADTHAI

Kolam

Lusona (Sona, plural)

Shipibo

Tlingit, Alaska

Alaska Native Languages

Tlingit map

August 24, 2006

Quilts by women ~ 1940- 2000. Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

“ No people… however hard their lives may be, spend all their time, all their energies in the acquisition of food and shelter … Even the poorest tribes have produced work that gives them esthetic pleasure …[they] devote much of their energy to the creation of works of beauty…No matter how diverse the ideals may be, the general character of the enjoyment of beauty is of the same order everywhere.” Franz Boas (1927). Primitive Art. New York: Dover

What is Ethnomathematics?

…the mathematics practiced among identifiable cultural groups, such as national-tribal societies, labor groups, children of certain age bracket, professional classes, and so on. Its identity depends largely on focuses of interest, on motivation, and on certain codes and jargons which do not belong to the realm of academic mathematics.

D’Ambrosio, 1985

ethno + mathema + tics = ethnomathematics

ethno - within a cultural environmentmathema - explaining and understanding in order to transcend, managing and coping with reality in order to survive and thrivetics - techniques such as counting, ordering, sorting, measuring, weighing, ciphering, classifying, inferring, and modeling.

D’Ambrosio, 2001.

Cultural anthropology

Cultural history

Mathematics

Ethnomathematics

Connecting to the museum as a resource

A field trip to the local museum.

• Pre-museum activity

• Semi-structured fieldwork

• Post-museum activity

• Curricular follow-up

MathematicsCultural artifact

Alternative forms of knowledge construction

Translation

Mirror Mirror MirrorReflection

In preparation…

Mirror

Rotation

Reflection

Glide

Translation

Reflection

Rotation

Glide

In a patterned weave, the pattern is generated by working one row at a time –like stacking layers of disembedded patterns in a row.

Without a routinzed algorithm, the weaver relies heavily on her capacity of visualizing the entire pattern, breaking down each layer of it, keeping a counting sequence as well as the ability to visually predict the entire sequence of pattern and self-correct counting mistakes made.

RRRRRR

R R

RRR RR

R R R R

R O

OO OO OO

OOOOOOOO

OO OO O

OO OO O

OO OO OO

A few comments

“When making this kind of art, thinking about math is unavoidable. The project makes art and math synonymous.”

“Do not teach an ethnocentric curriculum.”

“And if nothing else, the museum can serve as a humbling experience”.

“…striking interplay of art and function.”

“ … amazing connection to the globalized world.”

“Ethnomathematics encourages us to witness and struggle to understand how mathematics continues to be culturally adapted and used by people around the planet and throughout the time.” D’Ambrosio, 2001.

The intellectual activity of those without power is always characterized as non-intellectual. (Freire & Macedo, (1987), Literacy. Reading the word and the world, p. 188. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey)

Thank you

Let’s stay in touch

swapna@pdx.edu