Abstract
AbstractWe sketch the turbulent history of primary mathematics education in Belgium during the last (half) century. The outline starts with traditional mathematics in the period before and shortly after World War II, an approach that is often, but partly unjustly, labelled as ‘mechanistic’. Then we focus on the rise of New Math or ‘modern mathematics’ in the 1970s. We briefly discuss its roots and describe how this structural approach, which basically followed the development at the secondary level, was implemented in Belgian primary schools. By the early 1980s, New Math was strongly criticised, which paved the way for its fall during the 1990s. This leads us to the current curricula that are strongly inspired by the Dutch model of Realistic Mathematics Education (RME), while maintaining valuable elements of the strong Belgian tradition in developing students’ mental and written calculation skills and even some (minor) New Math accents. We describe in some detail the influence of RME on the different mathematical domains in these curricula, as well as some new challenges that arise on the horizon.
Highlights
The approach that dominated mathematics education before and in the first decades after World War II is often labelled as ‘mechanistic’ (Treffers, 1987)
A main source of inspiration for the New Math or structural approach was found in the work of Nicolas Bourbaki, a collective pseudonym for a group of mathematicians who, from the late 1930s on, started the ambitious project to rebuild and restructure the mathematical knowledge of that time, a project quite similar to that of Euclid in the 3rd century BC (Bourbaki, 1939)
Modern mathematics is the application of the model that Bourbaki developed for the science of mathematics as a model for mathematics education (De Bock, Janssens, & Verschaffel, 2004)
Summary
A common point of interest within CIEAEM at that time was related to the use of teaching aids, i.e., semi-concrete materials and models that could be used to stimulate students’ thinking and conceptual understanding (De Bock & Vanpaemel, 2015; Gattegno et al, 1958; Vanpaemel, De Bock, & Verschaffel, 2012) These teaching aids included cardboard models, light projections, Meccano constructions, geoboards, films, electrical circuits and the famous Cuisenaire rods, a set of coloured sticks of different lengths that can be used as a didactical tool to discover and to explain various arithmetical concepts and their properties. They were widely used in Belgian primary schools from the end of the 1950s to support insightful teaching and learning of whole number arithmetic
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