Is the relationship between art and mathematics addressed thoroughly in Spanish secondary school textbooks?

Abstract

This article discusses a review of the relationship between art and mathematics in Spanish secondary school mathematics textbooks. The art-mathematics connection identified in the textbooks was analyzed under six dimensions: (1) art for ornamental purposes; (2) art in calculation and measurement; (3) art to master concepts; (4) art to use technological resources in mathematics; (5) mathematical analysis of art; and (6) creating art with mathematics. Dimensions 1, 2 and 3 clearly prevailed over dimensions 4, 5 and 6, which called for more active participation and analytical reflection. Most of the activities attempted to illustrate the mathematics-art connection with real-world examples, but rarely entailed verifying a hypothesis or assumption nor did they encourage critical thinking for analyzing and creating art with mathematical or technological tools

Artworks as illustrations in Hungarian high school Mathematics textbooks

“…For our practical classification goals it is sufficient to consider the general description of artwork as a physical item or creation with aesthetic value. In our context, which is consonant to the approach followed by (Diego-Mantecón et al, 2019) this can be…”

“…After this quantitative survey, now we discuss in detail and provide examples to each dimension in the classification described above. As the authors explain in (Diego-Mantecón et al, 2019), the first dimension is where art is exclusively for ornamental, decorative purposes with no explicit mentioning of mathematics, the artistic element is not necessary even related to the actual text.…”

“…While one of the (depicting Paul Erdős) is a simple, documentary photo, therefore not considered as artwork, the other one (depicting René Descartes) is a reprint of a painting, thus falls into our artwork classification. In the detailed study of the illustrative artworks we follow the classification recently defined in (Diego-Mantecón et al, 2019). Here we briefly remind the reader to this classification.…”

“…Moreover, learning and teaching activities may involve various dimensions simultaneously. As an example of the authors provided in (Diego-Mantecón et al, 2019), a teachinglearning activity characterized under dimension 5 (mathematical analysis), can normally call for mastering concepts (dimension 3) as well as calculating and measuring (dimension 2). The classification and the dimensions will further be discussed in detail in the next section, parallel to our observations.…”