The constitution of school geometry in the Mathematics National Curriculum Statement and two Grade 10 geometry textbooks in South Africa.

Date
2015-05-19
Authors
Bowie, Lynn
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Abstract
The National Curriculum Statement for Mathematics for grades 10 – 12 (MNCS) was the first major revision of the South African school mathematics curriculum for learners in those grades post apartheid. Thus the MNCS was created at a time when there was considerable pressure for the curriculum to play a role in redressing the social wrongs of apartheid and to provide access to mathematics for all learners in the country. In this study I analysed the MNCS and the geometry chapters in two popular textbooks aligned with the curriculum in order to examine what was constituted as school geometry in these documents. I interviewed members of the committee that created the MNCS, geometry consultants whose advice was sought on the curriculum and the textbook authors in order to understand the factors and constraints that shaped the production of school geometry in these texts. A modification of Bernstein’s pedagogical device was used to frame the study and Kuzniak and Houdement’s notion of the paradigms of geometry was used to gain insight into the nature of the geometry produced. This study shows how different areas in the field of production (mathematics, mathematics education and the general regulative discourse) and from the field of reproduction interact in the field of recontextualisation, mutually influence each other and are each recontextualised into the pedagogical discourse of the curriculum and textbooks.
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