50 meters east from the ancient big fig tree: cultural ways of approaching spatial location with ethnomathematical potential

Abstract

Ethnomathematics deems the importance of considering aspects of the students’ culture in order to bring them a closer learning of mathematical concepts used in everyday practice. Therefore, it is necessary to first analyze in depth such elements of culture in order to identify relations with school mathematics and then to adequately train teachers. We present here the ethnomathematical analysis of the Costa Rican cultural sign of las direcciones a la tica as an idiosyncratic sign for the spatial location of postal addresses or indications to determine a place. We will use the emic-local, etic-global and dialogic-glocal perspectives as the main theoretical and methodological tools to carry out the analysis. Finally, we problematize this cultural sign for the pedagogical action describing some activities that have been carried out for the teacher training in Costa Rica.

Keywords:
Ethnomathematics; Teacher Education; Local and Global Perspectives; Localization; Space