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Ethnomathematics

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Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education

Introduction

Ethnomathematics as a field was established in the 1970s. At that time, it introduced a new perspective into mathematics education, considering it in relation with the cultural, political, social, and economic forces that shape the world.

One of the sources of the field can be found in the so-called People Education developed in Latin America beginning in the 1960s. The influence of the ideas of Paulo Freire in Brazil and in other “peripheral” countries, indicating the politicity of education, its non-neutrality, and its role in constructing a more just and egalitarian society, was also felt in the sphere of mathematics education (Powell and Frankenstein 1997). The Brazilian educator Ubiratan D’Ambrosio has one of his intellectual influences Freires’s ideas on education (Higginson 1997). He has been internationally acknowledged as who coined the term ethnomathematics and established its conceptual foundations.

D’Ambrosio (1997) explains the use of the word ethnomathematics...

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References

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Correspondence to Ubiratan D’Ambrósio .

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D’Ambrósio, U., Knijnik, G. (2020). Ethnomathematics. In: Lerman, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15789-0_60

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