Complex mathematical activities

Abstract

The work of the previous chapter is continued here for more complex operations. When looking at the world of cultures as we know it in anthropology a vast area of habits, actions and products are shown to have mathematical relevance, or to express mathematical skills. For each of the categories of the FORMA ethnographic contexts are brought into the discussion, showing the relevance and the potential educational surplus of particular types of knowledge mostly not considered in the math classroom. In this way the point is elaborated that drop-out on the part of children can be countered most probably by means of recognizing and actively using the out-of-school knowledge with mathematical relevance in a variety of cultural domains: architecture, the particular use of maps or geographical representations, ceremonial universes in sandpaintings, and such. Choreographers are found to work in a similar way sometimes, showing how dance and music can be framed in mathematical terms. And the same goes for other activities such as story telling, market activities, but even such presumably rigorous activities as computer design. For all of these sub-domains some empirical work from anthropology is cited, each time using that work in order to show how math education in a multimathemacy perspective can benefit from it.