BiFoEtMa Jama Musse Jama. You are visitor [NUMBER] since 1st May 1998

The First International Congress on Ethnomathemtics
will be held in Granada (Spain) from 2 to 5 September of 1998.

Ethnomathematics: an absolutely essential key for Mathematics Education.

Of course, "the way of doing" mathematics, which means the way of teaching and learning it, cannot be reduced unique and universal at least in the very early elementary levels of learning mathematics. In this stage there is no difference between "using mathematics" and "doing mathematics", infact what we do in the early elementary levels of mathematical education is to explain and to understand in a mathematical language those simple operations which we use to manage the every-day-live: counting, estimating, calculating etc. Needless to say how native algorithms to perform these operations are culturally-dependent and, therefore, are different. That is why the (Ethno)-Mathematics becomes absolutely essential for mathematics education.

The previous explanation DOES NOT imply that Ethnomathematics is ONLY an instrument to improve mathematical education. Indeed, the role of Ethnomathemtics is much more than improvement of way of teaching. During the The Latin-American Seminar of Phylosophy and History of Ideas, in his note entitled ETHNOMATHEMATICS AS REVISIONISM? , D'Ambrosio, cited that Ethnomathematics has a role in helping us to clarify the nature of Mathematical knowledge and of knowledge in general.

Ethnomathematics: first contacts in Internet
Online Ethnomathematics Bibliography
Traditional Games related to the ethnomathematics
Other sites related to the ethnomathematics

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Ethnomathematics: what is it?

In 1985 Ubiratan D'Ambrosio defined Ethnomathemtics as the maths practised among cultural groups such as national-tribal societies, labour groups, children of a certain age bracket, professional classes and so on". See, for example, D'Ambrosio, U. 1985, "Ethnomathematics and Its Place in the History and Pedagogy of Mathematics" in For the Learning of Mathematics, Vol. 5, FLM Publishing Association, Canada.

Since then, especially during in the recent years, many educators gave their attention to the subject and a lot of valuble work was done. In the Net, there are various online lists of publications relating to the ethnomathematics as well as many other sites relating to the ethnomathematics in general.

BiFoEtMa: Bibliography Finder For EthnoMathematics is an online references finder which is based a simple database that is compiled using different data sources. Some of these data came to me through e-mail files, and to avoid retyping them, I simply added to the database. So there is no uniformal structure of the results of BiFoEtMa, and probably, there can be some errors (type-writing errors). Morever, the list of publications is not yet as complete as possibile, so if you use it and find some missing items or errors, do not hesitate forward to me. I appreciate your suggessions as well as your contributions.

The aim of this page and the indexed database of references is to provide a source of information about the existing ethnomathematics publications. This can be of help especially for the young researchers and the students who are approaching for the first time research in ethnomathematics and relating topics (both mathematical and non mathematical topics).

Ethnomathematics in Internet

A first step can be to visit the International Study Group on Ethnomathematics home page. Among the other things, the Study Group circulates a printed newsletter about twice a year. To subscribe, contact directly to the ISGEm Newstletter. There are also some regional representatives of ISGEm. In Italy, the ISGEm can be reached by contacting to Prof. Franco Favilli, Dipartimento di matematica, Via Buonarroti, 2, 56100 Pisa, Italy..

Other sites related to the Ethnomathematics


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These pages are created and maintained by Jama Musse Jama (C) 1997 jama@mail.dm.unipi.it