The Potential Contribution of Indigenous Knowledge to Teaching and Learning Mathematics

这是一个跨学科研究项目，重点是通过数学对土著知识系统进行协作、跨文化研究。研究小组由土著和非土著研究人员组成，他们将研究将数学融入土著知识系统，并研究这些数学知识系统是如何嵌入和编码到日常活动中的。这个项目的中心假设是“……嵌入到传统的本土知识系统中--在他们的世界观、他们的认识方式和他们的行动方式中……是优雅的解决方案，具有丰富的数学知识。”(从星际导航，到服装样板，再到建造皮划艇……)该项目将在三个不同的北极文化、语言和地理区域进行：Yup‘ik(阿拉斯加)、Sami(挪威和瑞典)和Koryak(堪察加)，并以YAP(密克罗尼西亚联邦州)的一个比较地点作为对照。该项目的目的不仅仅是记录民族数学；该项目将在更广泛的文化认识论中介绍这类知识，并将审查人们学习活动和嵌入数学的本土教学方法。除了探索数学概念化，该项目还将记录数学语言，这种语言在所有这些群体中都处于濒危状态，也是研究濒危语言的语言学家很少捕捉到的语言方面。也许最重要的是，它有可能增加人类关于如何在不使用西方工具的情况下解决日常问题和任务的知识；如果类似的以数学为导向的过程在项目现场使用，这很可能表明将是普遍的概念，而不是文化上的特殊概念。因此，该项目有可能为土著和非土著环境中的数学教学建立一种以知识为基础的替代学习轨迹。

This is an interdisciplinary research project that focuses on collaborative, cross-cultural research into Indigenous knowledge systems via mathematics. The research team is made up of indigenous and non-indigenous researchers who will study the infusion of mathematics in Indigenous Knowledge systems (IKS) and studies how these mathematical knowledge systems are embedded and encoded into everyday activities. The central hypothesis of this project is that "...embedded in traditional indigenous knowledge systems--within their worldview, their way of knowing, and their way of doing...are elegant solutions that are mathematically rich." (from star navigation, to patterns for clothing to building a kayak...) The project will take place in three different arctic cultural, linguistic, and geographical regions: Yup'ik (Alaska), Sami (Norway and Sweden) and Koryak (Kamchatka) with a comparative site in Yap (a Federated State in Micronesia) as a control group. The project aims to do more than just document the ethnomathematics; the project will contextualize this kind of knowledge in broader cultural epistemologies and will also examine the indigenous pedagogies by which people learn the activities and the embedded mathematics. In addition to exploring mathematic conceptualizations the project will also record the language of mathematics, which is endangered among all of these groups and an aspect of language that is rarely captured by linguists working with endangered languages. Perhaps most importantly, it has the potential to add to human knowledge about how everyday problems and tasks are solved without using Western instrumentation; if similar mathematically-oriented processes are used across project sites this may well suggest will universal concepts rather than culturally particularlistic ones. Hence, this project has the potential to establish an alternative learning trajectory based on IKS for the teaching of mathematics in indigenous and non indigenous contexts.