Translating Local Cultural Practices into Mathematics Tasks in Indonesian and Thai Primary Schools

Source abstract

Connecting primary mathematics to pupils’ cultural experiences is widely encouraged, yet how teachers translate local practices into specific classroom tasks remains insufficiently documented. This study aims to compare the cultural resources, mathematical content, and instructional organization of ethnomathematics teaching in two primary schools in Indonesia and Thailand. The study employed a qualitative comparative case study design, drawing on unstructured interviews, non-participant classroom observations, and instructional documents. Data were analyzed through within-case descriptions and cross-case comparison. The findings revealed that the Indonesian school used tourism-related trading, coffee distribution, and market transactions mainly for arithmetic, grouping, and money calculations through worksheets and teacher-guided collaborative activities. In the Thai school, market transactions, patterned sarong fabrics, and the traditional game Teng te were connected to arithmetic, fractions, decimals, percentages, and geometry through project- and inquiry-oriented activities. Both schools used familiar community practices, yet they differed in the resources selected and how mathematical tasks were organized. These findings contribute a task-level comparison of culturally situated mathematics teaching and offer implications for designing context-sensitive primary mathematics tasks, without establishing their effectiveness for pupil learning.