The Network for Grassroots Science and Mathematics Education (NGSME) is an open group of experts and enthusiasts of Ethnomathematics and Ethnoscience. The focus of NGSME is to draw attention of all stakeholders in science and mathematics education to the relevance of culture-based instructional approaches in today’s classroom. NGSME emphasizes the need to incorporate elements of indigenous history, culture, traditions and everyday activities of learners into classroom practices. The aim of such approach to teaching and learning is to relate science and mathematics contents to the reality surrounding the learner, thereby demystifying the subjects and improving academic achievement.
The application of ethnomathematical approaches allows the opportunity to examine local knowledge systems and give insight into forms of mathematics used in diverse contexts and cultural groups. Ethnomathematics transcends the study of different mathematical ideas to encompass the critical study of the social, political and anthropological aspects of school mathematics, maintaining a critical stance on how mathematics is involved in the maintenance of the modern world. After many years of propagating mathematics so loaded with techniques, skills, as if belonging to a universe different from ours, modern education now calls for a mathematics that can help children to grow as individuals who are noble, splendid in mind and heart. Ethnomathematics is a response to this call.
The NGSME and VillageMath.net amplifies the recognition that every cultural group generates its own ways of explaining, understanding, and coping with reality, transmits and organizes these ways into techniques, develops these into a true methodology, and diffuses them through the group; improving and transmitting them from generation to generation. Our Network is on a quest to rediscover the practices that have been generated or learned by our ancestors, transmitted through generations, modified through a process of cultural dynamism, and learned by them in more casual, less formal ways.
We invite you to join us on this quest. Let us, together, rekindle the brightest moments of our collective past and enhance the scientific and mathematical knowledge of present and future generations.
Welcome on board!