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Mathematics teaching and learning have been dominated by a concern for the intellectual readiness of the child, debates over rote learning versus understanding and, recently, mathematical processes and thinking. The gaze into today's mathematics classroom is firmly focused on the individual learner. Recently, however, studies of mathematics in social practices, including the market place and the home, have initiated a shift of focus. Culture has become identified as a key to understanding the basis on which the learner appropriates meaning. The chapters in this timely book attempt to engage with this shift of focus and offer original contributions to the debate about mathematics teaching and learning. They adopt theoretical perspectives while drawing on the classroom as both the source of investigation and the site of potential change and development. The book will be of fundamental interest to lecturers and researchers and to teachers concerned with the classroom as a cultural phenomenon.
List of contents
The Culture of the Mathematics Classroom: An Unknown Quantity?.- Sets, Lies and Stereotypes.- Mathematics by All.- Whose Culture Includes Mathematics?.- Anthropology in the Mathematics Classroom?.- What Happens When Robots Have Feelings?.- The Computer as a Catalyst in the Mathematics Classroom?.- Spoken Mathematical Classroom Culture: Artifice and Artificiality.- Patterns of Interaction and the Culture of Mathematics Classrooms.- Language and "Subjectivity" in the Mathematics Classroom.- Changing Focus in the Mathematics Classroom.
About the author
Stephen Lerman is Professor of Mathematics Education and Deputy Director of the Centre for Research in Education at London South Bank University, England. His research interests include sociocultural theory, sociological perspectives of mathematics education, and classroom studies. He was lead researcher on an ESRC funded project to examine research publications over a 12 year period, part of which was to identify theories of learning adopted by researchers. He is coresearcher on an EU project called ABCMaths and on a project funded by the Australian Research Council working with remote indigenous schools in the north of Western Australia.
