Issue 70 Contents

 

 
 

Working in Hawaii and the Pacific

 

Nancy Lane

 
Nancy Lane

    From May 2001 to September 2004, I worked in Hawaii for Pacific Resources for Education and Learning (PREL), a regional educational laboratory that provided professional development for teachers across the U.S.-affiliated Pacific region. One of the projects I was involved in – the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) – provided an incredible opportunity to work with committed teachers and researchers not only across the United States, but across the world. The National Science Digital Library was set up by the US National Science Foundation to provide access to quality resources and tools that support the teaching and learning of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, from primary school through university undergraduate. PREL received a grant to create one small part of the NSDL – a virtual collection of resources on ethnomathematics, with emphasis on materials from the Pacific.

 

 

What is Ethnomathematics? www.ethnomath.org

 

You may well ask: What is ethnomathematics? It was the same question I first asked! I found that, taken broadly, it was the interaction between mathematical practices (for example, counting, measuring and calculating) and the indigenous communities or other cultural groups (for example, professional, religious, ethnic or sports groups) in which they arise. So Brazilian street children selling candy, Angolan sand drawings, the Hawaiian board game konane, Papua New Guinea body counting systems, and Incan knotted cords are all examples of ethnomathematics. As you can imagine, ethnomathematics resources can come from many disciplines – usually not mathematics
– including linguistics, anthropology, ethnography, sociology, history and education.The term itself was first used in the mid-1980s by Brazilian mathematician Ubiratan D’Ambrosio. He found that children could learn mathematics more easily and use it more readily if it drew on and was related to the culture with which they were familiar.

 

I came face-to-face with ethnomathematics when interacting with Pacific teachers – from the Northern Marianas, Guam, Micronesia, American Samoa, the Marshall Islands and Palau. For example, at one meeting we got into a lengthy discussion about the number of legs a pig has; for most people, the answer was two! This is because at feasts, the pig’s two legs are served to certain levels of chief and its two ‘arms’ are reserved for other levels. Indeed, the weight of a feast pig is measured not in kilos or pounds or some native equivalent, but in the number of men needed to carry it to and from the oven pit. So, for example, there are 2-men pigs and 4-men pigs.

 

One woman told me about the practice of harvesting medicinal herbs in her village. The ‘recipe’ for a potion may call for 6 leaves of a particular plant, but since leaves
are always collected in pairs, it really means 12.

 

And a teacher from Chuuk explained how in his language, the numbers you use depend on the objects you are counting. For example, flat objects such as paper, leaves, and tin roofs are counted with words different from those used for long objects such as canoes, fingers, or pencils.

 

Creating the Ethnomathematics Digital Library

 

It was one of my many responsibilities at
PREL to lead a small team to set up the
Ethnomathematics Digital Library (EDL)
as part of the NSDL. This required us:

Initially PREL staff searched the Internet for ethnomathematics resources in English, which consisted primarily of full-text articles and some websites. The aim was to assemble a pilot collection quickly, in order to develop and test the EDL’s indexing and searching features. We next let contracts with bibliographers and librarians who searched library and manuscript collections in Australia, New Zealand, Guam, Pohnpei, Fiji, Hawaii, and Washington, DC, for ethnomathematics resources related to the Pacific. PREL staff followed up on each resource, including those written in languages other than English, to digitise and index those in the public domain and to seek copyright permission for the others. This required contacting the publishers, or the authors or their estates. Unfortunately, many searches resulted in disappointing cold trails and dead ends.

 

Developing the EDL Collection

 

Although ethnomathematics draws on archeological and ethnographic data sometimes hundreds and thousands of years old, as a subject field it is in its infancy. Because it draws on resources from so many disciplines, we found it a challenge to determine the boundaries of the EDL. Through discussions with collaborating partners, we established two sets of selection criteria: one to delineate the boundaries of the collection and the other to provide guidance on quality. We included resources if they covered the philosophical and theoretical foundations of ethnomathematics; ethnomathematics research; indigenous mathematics, including number words, counting, measuring, calculating, spatial relationships and their applications; and non-European and pre-Renaissance European mathematics history. We did not include resources on mathematics achievement by gender or race.

 

With respect to the Pacific region, we included resources that covered mathematical practices in relation to agriculture and fishing; architecture and building; astronomy; barter and trade; calendar development; civil engineering works, such as roads, bridges, and canals; decorative arts; design and construction of canoes and household items; kinship relationships; land ownership; medicine and healing; music, including chanting, dancing, playing musical instruments, and singing; navigation; religious practices; sewing, quilting, beading, basketry, plaiting, and; sports, including scoring; tattooing, body painting, and body adornment; taxation; and toys and games, including games of chance.

 

For resources falling within collection boundaries, we added those meeting one or more of the criteria below:

Providing User Access www.science.org.au/nova/073/073key.htm
 

We launched the pilot version of the EDL at the Second International Congress on Ethnomathematics in Brazil; it included about 200 virtual resources. Ultimately we indexed about 800 resources in 20 languages covering more than 140 subjects, 130 geographical areas and 130 cultural groups around the world. The NSDL ‘harvested’ the EDL collection through the Open Archives Initiative. For each of the resources we included title; creator (for example, author or compiler); other contributors (for example, joint authors or illustrators); mathematical, educational and cultural subject headings; publisher; date; type of resource; format; URL; language; geographical area and cultural group; owner of intellectual property rights; audience (teacher, student, researcher or the public); and an annotation of 60-100 words describing the content, other key terms not included in the description and the number of references. To ensure consistency, we used sources such as the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names and the Encyclopedia of World Cultures for selecting headings.

 

Users can browse the virtual EDL collection by subject, geographical area or cultural group. Alternatively, they can do simple keyword searching or more advanced searching by title, author/creator/publisher, publication date, language, and intended audience, separately or in combination. Teachers can use the advanced search to limit results to classroom resources.

www.uog.ac.pg/glec

 

Collaborating with Partners Worldwide

 

Collaborating on the EDL with partners located in the continental U.S., the Pacific and internationally was incredibly stimulating as well as challenging. Within the U.S., the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse for Mathematics and Science Education at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, provided indexing services for the non-Pacific resources and is incorporating selected EDL resources into its new Middle School Portal. In Australia, the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) located, sought copyright clearance, digitised and indexed ethnomathematics resources related to Aboriginal culture. AIATSIS developed its own Aboriginal Ethnomathematics homepage (www1.aiatsis.gov.au/exhibitions/ethnomathmatics/ethno_hm.htm), and the Academy provided a Nova: Science in the News topic on ‘Ethnomathematics — A rich cultural diversity’ (www.science.org.au/nova/073/073key.htm).

 

PREL signed a non-exclusive licensing agreement with RMIT Publishing in Melbourne to make some of its Pacific ethnomathematics resources available through their Informit database. This will provide a small income stream to use towards maintenance.

 

The Glen Lean Centre at the University of Goroka (www.uog.ac.pg/glec) undertook several projects that made a wealth of unique material available. These included the development of an online database that provides access to the counting systems of about 800 language groups in Oceania, and the digitisation of materials that document these counting systems.

 

A librarian from the University of Guam carried out a comprehensive search for ethnomathematics publications and manuscripts at several locations in Guam, Hawaii and Fiji. He has contracted with the University of Hawaii Press to publish an annotated bibliography of ethnomathematics in Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Numerous other institutions also assisted the project. For example, PREL provided a book scanner for the University of Hawaii library in return for being allowed to digitise materials from their collections; the Universidade Estadual Paulista, Campus de Rio Claro, in Brazil digitised resources from the BOLEMA mathematics education journal; the Smithsonian Museum and the National Library of New Zealand digitised resources from their collections; and the Peace Corps in Pohnpei collected information on the mathematics of the Mwoakilloa Atoll in Micronesia.

 

Promoting the EDL

 

In addition to working with the institutions above, we distributed more than 5000 copies of a brochure about the EDL at conferences, exhibits and meetings, and wrote short articles about the EDL for several education and librarianship newsletters in the United States and Australia. CSIRO Education Programs published two articles about ethnomathmatics in their student magazines Scientriffic and The Helix. PREL reprinted The Helix article in Pacific Educator magazine, which was distributed to 25,000 teachers across the Pacific.

 

We held a number of workshops for teachers and librarians at the Pacific Education Conferences in American Samoa, Pohnpei and Rota, and at the Pacific Islands Association for Libraries, Archives, and Museums conferences in Chuuk and Pohnpei. Other training sessions were undertaken in conjunction with PREL’s Pacific Consortium for Mathematics and Science Education. We also gave presentations to a wide variety of groups, ranging from librarianship and education students at the University of Canberra and the University of Hawaii to the Mathematical Sciences Conference Group on Digital Educational Resources in Washington DC and the Second International Congress on Ethnomathematics in Brazil.

 

Importance of the EDL Website

 

From August 2002 to September 2004, the EDL received nearly a million hits. There were approximately 150000 page views (an average of about 200 per day) from 60000 visits, with an average length

Basketweaving in American Samoa

of 11 minutes, 40 seconds. About 23500 visitors made only one visit, and 4100 visitors made two or more.

 

These statistics do not reflect the growth rate, which was steady. For the first year, there were only a couple hundred visits a month. From April to December 2003, the average was between 1000 and 2000 visits per month, and from January to July 2004, usage climbed from 3000 to 7000 visits per month. During August 2004, there were about 9500 visits to the site.

 

About 75 per cent of visits were from the United States and 25 per cent were from elsewhere around the world. These comprised about 3800 visits from Western Europe, 2800 from South America, 2300 from Asia, 1900 from Australia, 1100 from the Pacific Islands, 400 from the Middle East, and about 300 each from Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, and Southern Africa. The most active countries were the United States with about 44000 visits, Brazil 2300, Australia 1900, and the United Kingdom and Canada 1400 each. New Zealand, the Netherlands, China, India, and Germany completed the ‘Top 10’.

 

Of the resources digitised and posted on the EDL website, six of the seven most visited were from Brazil and written in Portuguese. The number of visits ranged from 212 to 1190. The only English-language resource, with the fourth highest number of visits, was on discovering patterns and symmetry in weaving, which was featured in Pacific Educator.

 

On Reflection

 

Although ethnomathematics is a relatively new field, there is a dedicated and active group of researchers on every continent. Many are members of the International Study Group on Ethnomathematics or the North American Study Group on Ethnomathematics. A third international congress is planned for New Zealand in 2006 ( www.math.auckland.ac.nz/Events/2006/ICEM-3 ). Although I am no longer working in this field, I value my experience with the EDL. I had an extraordinary opportunity to work closely with people who held different priorities, values and world views. Coordinating an international project of this size was not without frustration; it certainly increased my creativity, tested my flexibility and broadened my perspective. If you ever have a similar opportunity, take it! You may not earn top dollars, but you will have made an incomparable investment in your personal growth and international understanding.

 

 Issue 70 Contents