Abstract:

In this paper we explore how elementary teachers can present meaningful mathematical tasks through stories from history of mathematics. We report about a research and curriculum development collaboration that aimed to explore how elementary mathematics teachers can use stories from history of mathematics to help students develop positive math identity and growth mindset. We describe theoretical considerations that draw on insights from Realistic Mathematics Education, History of Mathematics and Culturally Responsive Pedagogy. We explain how we capitalized in our curriculum development work on the concept of “contexts for mathematizing” and on recent trends regarding storytelling in teaching mathematics. In this study, we adopted calls that advocate the use of "mirror and window stories" that build on students' identities, cultures and representations. We describe then how we used an action research methodology to develop high quality curricular mathematics materials and how we collected feedback both from students and teachers using mixed methods. This methodological process resulted in the design of a story selection instrument that we used to identify students and teachers' interests. We also designed follow-up focus group interview protocols that we used to capture participants' reflections in more depth and details. We discuss the design of these instruments here and share findings from our initial analysis. In the last part of this paper we go over our curriculum development modules template and share examples of our teaching and learning activities from the history of mathematics in the Islamic context. We discuss the implications of using tasks based on storytelling from history of mathematics to positively represent the background and identities of elementary children from a specific background. We highlight in our conclusion the potentials of this approach in contributing to a stronger math identity and growth mathematical mindset. We also show how these activities can constitute windows for all students to learn about mathematical contributions of a certain group in any multicultural educational setting.

Keywords:

Elementary Mathematics, Storytelling, Children's Literature, Curriculum Development, Action Research, Culturally Responsive.