Desarrollo de una tesis doctoral en Etnomatemática: construcción de una investigación emergente

Abstract

The document is about the history of the development of the author’s PhD thesis. At the beginning, by understanding Ethnomathematics as the study of mathematical practices of specific cultural groups, the research focuses on the mathematical practices of a craft environment and a specified methodology is created as an instrument for the analysis of braids in two different crafts. The field work provides the evidence to distinguish that in the first braid craft the generated mathematical modeling can be considered as a situated interpretation since the artisans themselves manage it, but in the second braid craft the modeling is not situated as the artisans did not know it. A following ethnographic study provides the way these craftsmen think mathematically their own practice.The reflection above is the key point for the development of the following part of the PhD work. Ethnomathematics is re-conceptualized as the way of social thinking and understanding the quantitative, relational and spacial aspects of reality, making the author sensitive to the deep epistemological changes about the conception of mathematics as a social and cultural construct that taking on an ethnomathematics perspective involves. So we carried out a workshop addressed to teacher education with the objective of making the participants aware of their conceptions about the nature of mathematics through the direct and creative experience of a consensual modeling of braid crafts. Finally we recognize three dimensions in the ethnomathematical perspective that enable us to analyze the observations of a group of pre-service and in-service teachers after their participation in the workshop.

Keywords

• Ethnomathematics
• Ethnographical spiral
• emergent research
• methodology