MENON

UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN MACEDONIA
FACULTY OF EDUCATION
MENON
©online Journal Of Educational Research
5
possible to think better about the role of the history of mathematics in the
teaching and learning of mathematics and the development of theoretical and
conceptual frameworks which could provide the required equipment for the
production of finer and more focus investigations.
These issues include, among others, the educational and teaching
foundations of a cultural-historical perspective in the classroom, the need to
give voice to community stakeholders about the introduction and more
broadly, the nature and the terms of the empirical investigation prevailing in
the research environment.
Parallel to these advancements in research, an attempt to humanize
Mathematics is increasingly present in the mathematics curricula worldwide.
For over 20 years, the presence of the history of mathematics in training
teachers’ environments has increased considerably in many countries.
However, despite the different objectives associated with the introduction of
the history of mathematics in training mathematics teachers, this presence,
implicit or explicit, took the form of specific initiatives for each establishment of
teacher training.
By browsing through the literature since 1990, it is possible to classify the
empirical studies on the use of history in the mathematics classroom into two
categories: studies that relate to the narrative of grounded experiences and
quantitative studies on a larger scale.
Overall, it appears necessary to restore the research field on the introduction
of History in the teaching and learning of mathematics within Didactics of
mathematics and more generally with the educational sciences. This
repositioning should enable research to get inspired from the contexts of the
exploratory work from Humanities as well as theoretical, conceptual and
methodological issues from the Didactics of mathematics and educational
sciences.
This issue includes eight invited papers. Six papers are written in English
and two in French. Each text is accompanied by an abstract in English. The
following papers discuss specific issues in the domain of Using History of
Mathematics in Mathematics Education and are ordered according to the
instructional level; from elementary school to the university and in service
teachers training.
• Evelyne Barbin suggests a new thinking on technique, proposed in the
texts of Simondon and Rabardel. Her purpose, in introducing an
historical instrumental approach of geometrical teaching for students
aged 11-14 years, is to show how an instrument can be conceived both as
an invention to solve problems and as a knowledge or theorem in action.
In particular, she stresses the links between different varieties of
instruments and different kinds of knowledge and shows the
consequences of an instrumental failure for the construction of new
knowledge. Her goal is a coherent using where teaching is based on
families of instruments.
MENON: Journal Of Educational Research [ISSN: 1792-8494]
http://www.edu.uowm.gr/site/menon
2 nd THEMATIC ISSUE
05/2016