Socio-Cultural Issues Vol.2-521 COMMON SENSE, NECESSITY, AND INTENTION IN ETHNOMATHEMATICS

• Main Authors: David Wagner, Lisa Lunney
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Canada; Mi’kmaw
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.526.308; http://www.pmena.org/2006/cd/SOCIO-CULTURAL ISSUES/SOCIO-CULTURAL ISSUES-0013.pdf

In ethnomathematical conversations with Aboriginal elders in Eastern Canada, we examine conflicts in values and intentions between the cultural mathematical practices in Aboriginal communities (both traditional and modern) and Western-oriented schools. Elders ' accounts of their mathematical practices highlight common sense, which cannot be applied in a school setting abstracted from community issues and needs. “You just take a [piece of birch] bark and hold it over the circle. Fold it in half and fold it in half again to get the centre. ” Mi’kmaw elder, Diane Toney, was well-known for the quality of the boxes she made out of porcupine quills. For her, folding a round piece of bark to find the centre of the circle was common sense; it was not mathematics. As part of a large-scale project investigating mathematics and science learning in informal contexts in Atlantic Canada, we have been interviewing Aboriginal elders to identify some of their everyday practices (both traditional and current) that could be deemed mathematical. This typical approach to ethnomathematics research (c.f. Powell & Frankenstein, 1997) relies on Bishop’s (1988) definition of mathematical activity (practices that involves counting, measuring, locating, playing, designing or explaining) and on the assumption that any mathematics is an