Abstract:

The transformations that mathematics is undergoing are considered as a cultural phenomenon which plays an important role in the changes of the advancement processes of this discipline, and in the necessary regulations of its teaching.

The link between mathematics and social reality is increasingly closer and necessary in order to adequately develop the students’ capacities, a set of specific values, and a humanistic view of mathematics as accessible knowledge, promoted by a modern and progressive teaching of this discipline.
Similarly, the contextual situations or problems that arise when learning mathematics in the classroom are linked to the students’ different social realities. In these contexts, relationships between mathematical objects and students’ cognitive-affective stages can be established. It is within this socio-didactic framework that the teaching and learning of mathematics achieves further depth and development of its educational scope.

Mathematics has been defined as part of a cultural system, with culture meaning a collection of customs, rituals, beliefs, tools, etc. that belong to a group of people related to each other by an associative factor, such as the common belonging to a primitive tribe, geographical contiguity, or a common occupation (Wilder in Lolli, 2006).

According to this definition, mathematics, as any other system changes continually. Hence, the teaching contents and didactics adapt to it, for example: the hegemonic language of sets imposed by Bourbakis, undermining representational languages that contributed or refined geometric interpretation; the impact that computers reception can generate due to the visual representations, if it is not used conscientiously and adequately; the constructivist approach applied in mathematics teaching from an epistemological point of view, or ethno mathematics as a stream of scientific knowledge sociology. (Poblete & Díaz, 2012).

In the necessary regulations of mathematics teaching some aspects must be considered: the context, the students’ mistakes, the educational micro system according to Socas (2007), and other exogenous and endogenous variables of the system. In this article, we refer to the importance that contexts have when learning mathematics.

Keywords:

Socio-didactic, context, mathematical competences.