The foundational documents of Iran's educational system are formulated based on the presupposition of a divine innate disposition (Fitrah), which leads to a particular approach to religious education, including the concept of God presented to students. These documents rely on a specific interpretation of Fitrah that has not yet been critically…

We explore how the concept of abstraction, which is central to mathematical activity, can lead to detachment or attachment to land, nature, culture, language, and heritage in Indigenous contexts. We wonder if students detach themselves from mathematics because they feel mathematics asking them to detach themselves from people and places to whom…

This book brings together leading researchers in mathematics education to share personal narratives of key mathematical moments or ideas that inspired, surprised, or helped direct their research. While the fruits of research activities and products are shared at scholarly conference and journals, the footprints of mathematics that ignited the…

Communication is best understood as occurring along three dimensions: interactional, conceptual, and linguistic. However, few studies have examined early parent-child communication along all three dimensions simultaneously. This study examines these three dimensions of communication in Norwegian parent-child interactions during play. Thirty-nine…

In this study, a research team made up of Métis artists and knowledge keepers, Anishinaabe and non-Indigenous educators, and a non-Indigenous university mathematics education researcher co-designed and delivered an Indigenous cultural mathematical inquiry in a Grade 5 classroom. We explored the connections between loom bead designs and…

The purpose of this study was to examine the abstraction thinking or the vertical reorganization activity of mathematical concepts of high school students while taking account of the abstraction that was constructed earlier, and the socio-cultural background. This study was qualitative in nature with task-based interviews as the method of…

This paper uses a comparative methodology to examine the teaching of abstraction in two mathematics lessons, in Denmark and England. In doing so it aims to extend previous work by the authors, examining the effect of local, cultural issues on the form of teaching in order to understand how these also affect the subject content too. The analysis…

Information flows continuously in the environment. As we attempt to do something, our senses receive large volumes of information. In any conversation, messages are exchanged rapidly. To understand meaning, we have to focus, record, choose and process relevant information at every moment, before it is displaced by other information. Often,…

Learners of English as a foreign language often find it difficult to understand figurative speech, which relies heavily on metaphor. This article explores why metaphors challenge learners and presents ways to incorporate metaphors into EFL instruction to help learners understand figurative speech. Topics discussed include cognitive metaphor,…

This study considers tertiary calculus students' and instructors' conceptualizations of slope. Qualitative techniques were employed to classify responses to 5 items using conceptualizations of slope identified across various research settings. Students' responses suggest that they rely on procedurally based conceptualizations of…

There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition" was published and its…

This study investigates Chinese and U.S. teachers' cultural beliefs concerning effective mathematics teaching from the teachers' perspectives. Although sharing some common beliefs, the two groups of teachers think differently about both mathematics understanding and the features of effective teaching. The sample of U.S. teachers put more emphasis…

This study focuses on the use of parables, proverbs, and metaphors as codifications in an educational program in rural Zaire. Its thesis is that Freire's concept of codification has tremendous conceptual power for transforming perspectives and providing hope in the face of dominance. (CT)

For a specialist from the communication discipline, studying with Alexander Luria, who had been a colleague of Lev Vygotsky in the l920's, provided insights into the Soviet psychologist's ideas about mediation and mind and how writing fits into those ideas. According to Luria, Vygotsky was a methodologist who worried about what kinds of methods…