Kay Owens – författare

This book develops the theoretical perspective on visuospatial reasoning in ecocultural contexts, granting insights on how the language, gestures, and representations of different cultures reflect visuospatial reasoning in context.  

For a number of years, two themes in the field of mathematics education have run parallel with each other with only a passing acquaintance.  These two areas are the psychological perspective on visuospatial reasoning and ecocultural perspectives on mathematics education.  This volume examines both areas of research and explores the intersection of these powerful ideas.  

In addition, there has been a growing interest in sociocultural aspects of education and in particular that of Indigenous education in the field of mathematics education.  There has not, however, been a sound analysis of how environmental and cultural contexts impact visuospatial reasoning, although it was noted as far back as the 1980s when Alan Bishop developed his duality of visual processing and interpreting visual information.  This book provides this analysis and in so doing not only articulates new and worthwhile lines of research, but also uncovers and makes real a variety of useful professional approaches in teaching school mathematics.  With a renewed interest in visuospatial reasoning in the mathematics education community, this volume is extremely timely and adds significantly to current literature on the topic.

This unique volume presents an ecocultural and embodied perspective on understanding numbers and their history in indigenous communities.  The book focuses on research carried out in Papua New Guinea and Oceania, and will help educators understand humanity''s use of numbers, and their development and change. The authors focus on indigenous mathematics education in the early years and shine light on the unique processes and number systems of non-European styled cultural classrooms. This new perspective for mathematics education challenges educators who have not heard about the history of number outside of Western traditions, and can help them develop a rich cultural competence in their own practice and a new vision of foundational number concepts such as large numbers, groups, and systems. Featured in this invaluable resource are some data and analyses that chief researcher Glendon Angove Lean collected while living in Papua New Guinea before his death in 1995.

Among the topicscovered:

In this volume Kay Owens draws on recent research from diverse fields such as linguistics and archaeology to present their exegesis on the history of number reachingback ten thousand years ago.  Researchers and educators interested in the history of mathematical sciences will find History of Number: Evidence from Papua New Guinea and Oceania to be an invaluable resource.