Key question I chose

How can I incorporate ethnomathematics into my teaching practice?

Before this unit, I usually thought of mathematics teaching as helping students move from examples to rules, then from rules to symbols. After doing the readings, I realized that another important question must be asked first: whose mathematics is being recognized in the classroom? That question stayed with me because I teach in a public school setting where students come from real communities with their own practices, languages, routines, and ways of reasoning. If I ignore those, then I may still be teaching mathematics, but I may not be teaching it in a way that feels meaningful or truthful to their lives.

What struck me most in the ethnomathematics reading is the idea that mathematical practices already exist in culture. Counting, measuring, sorting, weighing, classifying, and modelling are not born only inside textbooks. They are also found in the practices of identifiable cultural groups, even if schooling often replaces those living practices with a codified version called “academic mathematics” (D’Ambrosio, 1985).

This changed the way I think about my role as a teacher. I do not want to romanticize local practices or pretend that every community activity is automatically a lesson. But I do think ethnomathematics gives me a better starting point. Instead of treating students as if they enter the classroom mathematically empty, I can begin with the forms of reasoning that are already present in their lives and then help them connect these to formal mathematics.

This is especially meaningful in the Philippine context. Manapat’s essay argues that early Philippine society already had a highly developed enumeration and arithmetical system, along with geometric ideas, astronomical tools, and other mathematical practices. He also points to examples such as weaving, gong music, shipbuilding, measurement, and even compounding-type reasoning in rice debt and interest as evidence that mathematical thinking was embedded in everyday life long before formal modern schooling (Manapat, 2011).

That matters to me because it pushes back against the quiet assumption that real mathematics always comes from outside us and arrives only through formal schooling. One of the strongest lessons I got from the readings is that colonization did not only reshape politics and institutions; it also shaped what counts as legitimate knowledge. Schubring notes that in many colonized countries, the school system was patterned after that of the colonizing country, and after independence these systems still struggled to respond to the different cultures and classes within their own societies (Schubring, 2021).

In my teaching practice, this means I should not treat ethnomathematics as a side anecdote for “motivation” before the real lesson begins. I should treat it as a bridge. For example, if I am teaching patterns, functions, or sequences, I can start from weaving designs, roof layouts, planting arrangements, or repeated budgeting decisions in the household. If I am teaching Statistics and Probability, I can use local data that students actually recognize: daily allowance, tricycle fares, rainfall patterns, school attendance, harvest yields, sari-sari store sales, or even class-level survey data. In this way, students do not just apply mathematics to reality after the lesson. Reality is already part of the lesson from the beginning.

As a Grade 11 teacher, I think this is important because many students can follow a procedure but still struggle to explain what a quantity means or why a method makes sense. Ethnomathematics can help slow down that disconnect. When a student sees that estimation already happens when a family budgets rice for a week, or that variation already appears when comparing harvest outcomes, or that symmetry and transformation already exist in design and craft, mathematics becomes less foreign. It becomes something they can recognize before they formalize it.

I also think this approach can make classroom participation more humane. In many classrooms, students become silent because they are afraid of being wrong in the language of school mathematics. But if I begin with familiar practices, students may be more willing to speak, compare, and reason. The goal is not to stop at the local level. The goal is to move from lived mathematics to formal mathematics more consciously. I still want my students to learn standard notation, formal definitions, and disciplined solutions. But I want them to reach those through connection, not alienation.

So how will I incorporate ethnomathematics into my teaching practice? I think the answer is simple, although not always easy. I will begin with local practices, treat community knowledge as intellectually serious, and use those as entry points toward formal mathematical ideas. I will not reduce mathematics to culture alone, but I will also no longer teach it as if culture does not matter.

In the end, ethnomathematics reminds me that mathematics education is not only about transmitting content. It is also about recognizing people. When students see that mathematical thinking is already present in their world, they may begin to see that they, too, belong in mathematics.

Good mathematics teaching does not only ask students to enter the world of mathematics; it also allows mathematics to enter the world students already know.

References

D’Ambrosio, U. (1985). Ethnomathematics and its place in the history and pedagogy of mathematics. For the Learning of Mathematics, 5(1), 44–48.

Manapat, R. (2011). Mathematical ideas in early Philippine society. Philippine Studies, 59(3), 291–336.

Schubring, G. (2021). On processes of coloniality and decoloniality of knowledge: Notions for analysing the international history of mathematics teaching. ZDM – Mathematics Education, 53(7), 1455–1469.