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Mathematics Education in India: Status and Outlook

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Mathematics Education in India: Status and Outlook 12 R. Ramanujam Mathematics Education in India Status and Outlook Editors R. Ramanujam K. Subramaniam Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Editors R. Ramanujam K. Subramaniam Cover Design and Layout Manoj Nair The diagram on the cover is a Vedic chiti or sacrifi cial altar made of geometrically shaped bricks (See Chapter 2). Printed at Shree Sai Printers, Worli, Mumbai Published by Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education Tata Institute of Fundamental Research V. N. Purav Marg, Mankhurd, Mumbai – 400088 As part the National Initiative in Mathematics Education (NIME) © Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, 2012 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Preface This collection of articles on the status of and outlook for mathematics education in India provides a detailed background for the Indian National Presentation at the 12th International Congress on Mathematics Education (Seoul, July 2012). It provides a viewpoint on the vast and varied landscape of the subject, and offers an insight into not only the problems and potential of mathematics education in India but also how they are approached by scholars active in this arena. Mathematics is embedded deeply into the life and culture of people in the Indian subcontinent, attested by a long history of engagement with mathematics in art, craft, work and abstract disciplines of thought. This has also meant a tradition of socially embedded modes of education and learning in aspects of mathematics as well. Such a historical perspective on mathematics and its education in India is illustrated briefl y in this collection. Most of the articles centre on school mathematics, refl ecting the current centrality of concern in Indian education. With the Right to Education legislated by the Indian Parliament in recent years, universalization of school education is becoming an imminent reality. On the other hand, the need for strengthening mathematics education at school level is acknowledged by all policy planners. While the overall expansion and development of higher education remains an important issue, problems of curriculum and pedagogy, assessment and teacher professional development have their roots in mathematics at school, and these are discussed at some length. The paucity of research in mathematics education and its infl uence on policy is pointed out. India is characterized by diversity and cultural riches, as well as endemic poverty and social division, and this is refl ected in mathematics education as well. Despite the tremendous challenges, also visible are a number of innovative initiatives, some small and some on a large scale. While a short collection like this cannot hope to evaluate the effectiveness of such initiatives, it does point to them with a sense of hope towards the future. Any short set of articles and authors on mathematics education in India must necessarily be selective and this collection very likely excludes many important and interesting issues. Yet we hope that it adds value to discussions on this theme, not only among Indian educators, but among the international community of mathematics educators as well. This collection is an outcome of the National Initiative in Mathematics Education (NIME) launched under the auspices of the Indian National Science Academy. The NIME initiative and the publication of this book were supported generously by the National Board of Higher Mathematics. Similarly, the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education extended support to the NIME initiative by publishing this collection and in other ways. We thank the organizers and participants of the NIME regional and national conferences and the National Seminar on the History and Cultural Aspects of Mathematics Education organized by the Indira Gandhi National Open University. The material in this collection draw on the proceedings of these conferences. We thank the members of the NIME Steering Committee for guidance and support. The authors of the collection have made great efforts in putting together information and ideas, often when there was insuffi cient or no prior work to draw upon. They have managed extremely tight deadlines and have co-operated in every possible way. We are grateful to them for making the collection possible. We thank K. Ramasubramanian for permission to use the diagram on the cover. The members of the mathematics education group at the Homi Bhabha Centre pitched in to ease the labour of production. Manoj Nair, as always, was the person who saw the production through till the end. June 2012 R. Ramanujam, Chennai K. Subramaniam, Mumbai Contents Mathematics education in India – An overview ................................................. 1 R. Ramanujam Glimpses of the History of Mathematics in India ............................................... 13 K. Ramasubramanian Indigenous traditions and the colonial encounter: A historical perspective on mathematics education in India ..................................................................... 37 D. Senthil Babu Transforming the Elementary Mathematics Curriculum: Issues and Challenges .................................................................................... 63 Anita Rampal & Jayasree Subramanian Mathematics up to the Secondary Level in India ................................................ 89 Hridaykant Dewan, Namrita Batra & Inder Singh Chabra The Senior Secondary Mathematics Curriculum ................................................ 107 Shailesh A. Shirali & Jonaki B. Ghosh Curriculum and Pedagogy in Mathematics: Focus on the Tertiary Level ......... 127 Geetha Venkataraman, Vinayak Sholapurkar and Bhaba Kumar Sarma The preparation and professional development of mathematics teachers .......... 151 Ruchi S. Kumar, Hridaykant Dewan & K. Subramaniam Innovations and initiatives in mathematics education in India ........................... 183 Rakhi Banerjee Mathematics education research in India: Issues and challenges ....................... 191 Rakhi Banerjee 12 R. Ramanujam Mathematics education in India – An overview 1 1. Mathematics education in India – An overview R. Ramanujam Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai [email protected] Introduction The spirit of modernity and development in nations is refl ected in their investment in children’s education in general. If science education is often termed as societal investment in the envisioned future, education in the “high roads of mathematics” perhaps constitutes their hope for the as-yet unvisioned future. Presidents and Prime Ministers remind their people that science and mathematics education need to equip the nation’s youth to meet the challenges of the ‘new economy’. Modern nations see value in building a mathematically literate society and hope for a strong mathematical elite that can shape the knowledge economy of the 21st century. At the same time, mathematical profi ciency is universally considered hard to achieve. India, with its strong mathematical traditions, may be expected by the world to produce excellence in mathematics. But this may be an unreasonable expectation, since India is grappling with problems of endemic poverty, and even universalising education is a challenge. Yet, despite adversity, India has managed to produce mathematicians like Ramanujan and Harish-Chandra. All this adds up to an intriguing picture. In contrast to the expectations of the global elite, one should consider the hopes and aspirations of the Indian people themselves. In a population that is largely poor (by any standards), education is seen as the key instrument to break out of poverty. As many adult education programmes in India demonstrated, the non-literate or neo-literate poor see the ability to ‘calculate’, to ‘estimate’ and to ‘predict’ as essential life-skills that education must (and hopefully does) impart, skills whose natural home in the school curriculum is mathematics. Once again, what one perceives is a sense of disappointment that school education does not impart such skills. In a public hearing in 2006 when a curriculum 2 R. Ramanujam group met members of the general public, a grocer bitterly complained that he could never fi nd educated young recruits who could calculate when stocks would need to be replenished and by how much. What then characterizes mathematics education in India? We suggest that it is this mix, of severe systemic challenges, but yet a growing young population approaching them with a sense of hope, in a land of many innovations and initiatives, a system operating rather chaotically. In this article, we attempt to give a bird’s eye-view of the vast landscape of mathematics education in India. Systemic Challenges The landscape of mathematics education in India calls for a very broad vision to encompass and comprehend. It is not only a matter of scale and magnitude in numbers of children and teachers that constitute the system, but also messy but democratic modes of functioning in which there are pulls from many social and political aspirants of society. We want every child to learn mathematics and enjoy it; the reality of achieving this with millions of children and teachers by democratic means provides a major systemic challenge. Before we look at how this affects mathematics education specifi cally, we need an understanding of the vast system it operates in. The law called Right of Children
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