Abstract:

In this ethnographical study, we focus on one essential issue of Jamaican culture: traditional games usually played on the Caribbean island. Playing games is a cultural activity with key implications for STEAM education. Studies in this emerging approach claim that playful activities and games are especially suitable to articulate educational proposals around them, both in formal and non-formal contexts. With this future intention, and based on the ethnomathematical foundations related to intercultural education, we decided to study traditional Jamaican games with two underlying aspirations: to value the Jamaican culture and play as a teaching-learning methodology.

We first study Jamaica’s culture and later, the traditional games that are usually played nowadays on the island. When searching for these games, we take into account their future potential and among others, their scientific-mathematical conceptual aspects (notions about measurement, space, vector magnitudes, strength, speed, balance...) and procedural content (logic, relationship establishment, question formulation, emission and hypothesis testing , experimentation through trial and error...), as well as attitudinal values (perseverance, honesty, humility, respect, companionship, empathy, solidarity...), according to the STEAM approach.

Afterward, we classified the games we found according to not mutually exclusive criteria found in the academic literature, namely:
a) Psychomotor games: they improve physical abilities and body knowledge.
b) Sensory games: they favour the use of the senses.
c) Cognitive games: they develop intellectual abilities (reasoning, language...).
d) Social games: they encourage cooperation, the sense of group responsibility and the feeling of belonging to a group.
e) Affective-emotional games: they facilitate the recognition and expression of emotions as well as the establishment of affective bonds.
f) Conceptual games: they allow the application of conceptual curricular contents.
g) Creativity games: they enhance the imagination and abstract thinking.

Taking into account classification criteria found in the literature, we made compiled 23 games that we found. This classification revealed that most of the Jamaican cultural games we collected are psychomotor (15 of the 23), with many of them being social games (9 of the 23). All affective-emotional games (5) that were collected are of a musical nature and, in addition, some of them are gestural-type games. The sensory games collected (3) are of recognition and discrimination. Among the cognitive games, attention ones stand out (5 of 7), some of which are also of observation, memory and linguistic expression. Some of the collected games are also conceptual (5) and creativity (3) games. Among psychomotor games, the ones that stand out are those of locomotion (9 of 15) and of precision (7 of 15), and among social games, those of rules (7 of 9) are the ones that stand out. Some of the psychomotor games are also of balance and strength, while several of the social games are cooperative ones.

The classification made in this ethnographic study has revealed that most of Jamaican cultural games that were collected are psychomotor type games, many of them being social games. In addition, all affective-emotional type games are musical games. Connecting these results with the study of Jamaican culture, a strong parallelism is found between the characteristic features of this culture and its playful practices.

Keywords:

STEAM education, ethnomathematics, game-based learning, traditional games, intercultural education, ethnography.