Contextualización culturalmente significativa de problemas matemáticos en el currículo, en la percepción docente y en la formación de profesores en Costa Rica

Abstract

Since the end of the 20th century, the Ethnomathematics Program has promoted the linking of formal education with mathematics that emerges from the daily practices of the environment (Bishop, 1991; D'Ambrosio, 2013; Gerdes, 1998). Consequently, various researchers have promoted training spaces aimed at teachers, where the use of contextual situations for teaching mathematics is proposed (Albanese et al., 2014; Gavarrete & Oliveras, 2012; Oliveras, 1996). In the case of Costa Rica, where this doctoral research is located, an educational reform of 2012 has promoted the resolution of contextualized problems in the teaching of mathematics. In this panorama, three studies that make up the doctoral research are carried out. The first presents an analysis of the contexts (Ramos & Font, 2006) and contextualization (Albanese et al., 2017; MEP, 2012) of the problems proposed in the official curriculum of Costa Rica, in particular in the specific indications of the Program of Mathematics Studies (MEP, 2012), through a qualitative content analysis (Bardin, 2012). The results allow us to conclude that most of the problems provided by the MEP are far from the way they would be addressed in reality. The second study describes the perception of mathematics teachers regarding the selection, creation and application of contextualized mathematical problems, for which a questionnaire is designed and validated and an exploratory, descriptive and correlational study is carried out through a quantitative analysis (Hernández, Fernández and Baptista, 2014). The results indicate that, although teachers have favorable opinions about the use of problems with real contexts, most of them choose or prepare problems that do not contemplate these contexts. The third study addresses the implementation of a course aimed at secondary school teachers for the elaboration of mathematical problems with culturally significant contextualization based on the study of cultural signs (Oliveras, 2005). The analysis of the problems resulting from the course is carried out from a qualitative approach, integrating indicators of authenticity of mathematical problems (Palm, 2008) to the definition of culturally significant contextualization. The results allow us to observe the presence of problems with culturally significant contextualization, in which the authenticity of questions and purposes stands out, although it points to the need to pay more attention in the future to the authenticity of the data, an aspect in which teachers have encountered some difficulty. The research provides the conceptualization of a mathematical problem with culturally significant contextualization, providing an objective methodology for the analysis of problems from a sociocultural view of mathematics, based on solid theoretical foundations. In addition, it presents a continuous training design that promotes the reflective process of the mathematics teacher.