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Features: Dec. 3, 2001
Grant Funds Software That Combines Math
and Culture
Two Rensselaer professors have received
a grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary
Education (FIPSE) to train area school teachers and their
students in grades 5 though 12 in the use of new software
designed to encourage a multicultural approach to mathematics.
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The grant buttresses an earlier one
Eglash received from the National Science Foundation
to develop software design tools to encourage underrepresented
local minority students to understand mathematics from
a cultural standpoint.
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Ron Eglash, assistant professor of science
and technology studies, and Lester Rubenfeld, professor
of mathematics and director of the Center for Initiatives
in Pre-College Education, received the $358,000 award for
the three-year project. The grant buttresses an earlier
one Eglash received from the National Science Foundation
to develop software design tools to encourage underrepresented
local minority students to understand mathematics from a
cultural standpoint.
The new FIPSE grant will extend this work
to groups across the nation, including Pacific Islanders
in Hawaii, several Native American tribes, and various Latino
and African American communities.
 For
example, Eglash worked with Native American students and
teachers on the Shoshone-Bannock reservation to develop
a "virtual
bead loom"
Eglash found that the traditional loom was based on a four-quadrant
system, like many Native American knowledge concepts such
as the "four winds" of native cosmology. The virtual
loom allows students to place beads by entering cartesian
coordinates. The next version of the loom will offer students
bead pattern tools based on the indigenous algorithms used
by traditional beadworkers.
"There is dramatic evidence that people
of all societies have traditionally used complex mathematical
ideas," says Eglash. "Yet most of this research
remains buried in anthropology journals. By translating
ethnomathematics into software design tools, minority students
can use math to combine their own creativity with new explorations
of their heritage culture."
The software development will be combined
with a training program for pre-service and in-service secondary
teachers in grades 5 through 12.
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