Integration Of National Culture And Basic Mathematics Education

Math in a Cultural Context (MCC) is a project developed together by University of Alaska, the indigenous community, and school districts of southeast Alaska. The aim of the project is to develop supplemental elementary school mathematics curriculum. The curriculum was developed for the Alaska context, picking up some practices in daily life which the young kids are familiar with as activities, then embedding mathematics learning into those activities, and some traditional stories as well. All of these efforts they do are to make native children ready for learning country curriculum smoothly. In statistical level the researches make clear that MCC has acquired fine effects, with heightening the academic achievements of native children outstandingly. The paper tries to provide some advices to the mathematics curriculum reform in minority nationality area of our country through introducing and analyzing MCC.There are three parts in my paper. The first part is the introduction, presenting the reasons of the study and the review, defining some conception and describing my study methods using in this article.The second part is the main part of my article, including four chapters. The first chaper introduced the origins of MCC from the perspective of culture in Education. And I related it from two aspects, the indigenous education and the contemporary mathematics education. The second chapter introduced the MCC. After showed the background, establishment, aim, and the achievement of MCC, I elaborated curriculum, teachers, and research of the project. MCC's theoretical framework makes connections between traditional mathematics, Yup'ik culture, and pedagogy. The core of MCC is Ethnomathematics. MCC module are cultural based and address standard. Pedagogy of MCC meet Yup'ik ways of knowing. The third charpt analyzed the success of MCC from the perspective of Vygotsky's theory indigenous knowledge. And the last charpt discussed the inspiration that MCC is to the reform of mathematics course in our minority nationality area.