An ethnographic research: the cultural portraits of middle school mathematics classrooms in an international school

Abstract

The reality that classrooms are becoming more multicultural each day, partly due to globalisation, has changed the classroom cultures from the way they were in the past. Classrooms in international schools are extreme examples of this change. The purpose of this ethnographic study was to describe the formal mathematical enculturation of the middleschool students in an international sc hool. It examined the entire academic year during the ongoing creation of a specific mathematical culture within the classroom and revealed and portrayed how each of its members defined, maintained, and shared the unique mathematical culture of the classroom. Ethnomathematics and mathematical enculturation theories, as well as mathematics as a component of culture became the foundations of this study, providing invaluable contribution in explaining the mathematical culture of the research setting. This study sought answers to questions starting with “how” and “what” instead of answers to questions that start with “why”. The best qualitative approach to describe the everyday life of participants in this particular research was through ethnography. The quantitative analysis was used to supplement the findings. The data obtained from this study proved the dynamic nature of the creation of the culture in an international school mathematics classroom. Thus, the central theory of this study, Bishop’s (1988) mathematical enculturation was verified in terms of its ability to describe the mathematics culture of an international school and to explain the approaches of students to enculturation and acculturation processes.