Situational Analysis of Students’ Imagination and Creativity through Mathematical Discourse at Babur School in Dire Dawa
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Date
2007-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Mathematics education is a multi-disciplinary field of study which treats a wide range of diverse but interrelated areas. The Philosophy of Mathematics Education as a subfield covers: the status of Mathematics Education as knowledge field; the understanding of, and the meaning we attribute to, mathematics and its nature; purposes and meanings of teaching and learning mathematics; and the relationship between mathematics and society. I recognized that learning mathematics is about discourse, imagination and creativity. The objective of this study was exploring the status of imagination and creativity in a classroom mathematical discourse. Situational Analysis was employed as the method of inquiry to understand the dense complexities of the situation. Data were collected from Dire Dawa city, Eastern Ethiopia using audio-video recordings, field notes, focus group discussions, and documents. Comprehensive data were collected from a grade 12 mathematics classroom at Babur school in the city. The broadly conceived situation and Focused Groups of students within the classroom served as units of analyses. I followed the emic approach to study the socio-cultural and thus meaning makings were supplemented by applying the Ethiopian Orthodox Church interpretive methods. This study has shown that remembering, intuition, ambiguity, visualization, illustration, argumentation, persistence, usefulness, understanding, flexibility, evaluation, fluency, insightful, and originality are common indicators for imagination and creativity. On the other hand, dwellers‘ ―simple‖ and ―harmony‖ life styles were mathematical elements; they have impacted on students‘ fluency and persistence. The socio-cultural mathematics in Dire Dawa is described by mathematizing Christianity and making multiple meanings of one plus one. These were either missed opportunities for or impacting factors in engaging students in imagination and developing their creativity. Furthermore, the study revealed that some problems and activities in the text book that could have been opportunities for developing pattern, prediction and generalization were not delivered in the classroom. This study showed the bi-implication of creativity and imagination with grounded theoring. The research would contribute for popularizing Mathematics Education as a discipline in Ethiopia. Key Terms:- discourse, imagination, creativity, philosophizing, theorizing, situation, map
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discourse, imagination, creativity, philosophizing, theorizing, situation, map