Culture and geography: how do primary students map their local environment?

ICMI Column

“…The logo design and its explanation acknowledge the First Nations people, including teachers and learners of mathematics whose mathematical knowledge, languages and cultures have historically been marginalized in Australian mathematics schools and throughout the world. This acknowledgment particularly recognizes the mathematical practices in the rural and remote communities, also documented by research in mathematics education conducted in collaboration with these communities (see, e.g., the sophisticated large-scale spatial representations of the peoples in the northwestern Kimberley region discussed in [7]).…”

Spatial reasoning in context: bridging cognitive and educational perspectives of spatial-mathematics relations

“…This process is designed to ensure equity; however it only serves to highlight inequality in education. A significant contribution from the field of mathematics education can be found in work with disadvantaged communities using non-traditional spatial tasks, such as the use of symmetry and proportional reasoning amongst basket weavers in Papua New Guinea (Owens, 2020) or the highly tuned navigational skills demonstrated in Indigenous communities (Watson-Verran and Chambers, 1989;Lowrie et al, 2022). In these studies, disadvantage stops becoming a factor and in fact we see strengths in the practical and meaningful applications of spatial skills.…”

“…However, there are inconsistencies and gaps between cognitive models of spatial skills and their applications in everyday practice (Gagnier and Fisher, 2020;Woolcott et al, 2020;Coutrot et al, 2022;Harris et al, 2022;Newcombe et al, 2022). For example, although often considered to possess poor spatial skills based on cognitive test performance (Levine et al, 2005;Wai et al, 2009;Jirout and Newcombe, 2015), individuals classified as disadvantaged in terms of socioeconomic status and geographic isolation have been found to possess superior navigation and spatial location skills (Coutrot et al, 2022;Harris et al, 2022;Lowrie et al, 2022). Most gaps emerge in terms of the translation of experimental findings into classroom practice where despite evidence for the influence of spatial skills on STEM understandings, they do not form part of standard STEM instruction (Davis and Spatial Reasoning Study Group, 2015;Gagnier and Fisher, 2020;Hawes et al, 2023).…”