Author Details and Abstract

Details of First (Main) Author

Pankaj Singh
PhD Student
Philosophy Discipline
Humanities and Social Sciences Department
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
Room No. S-303, New RA Tower, IIT Kanpur
Kalyanpur, 208016, U.P. India
+91 8795530965
pankajsi@iitk.ac.in; pankajsingh.028@gamil.com

Details of Co-author
Meha Mishra
PhD Student
Philosophy Discipline
Humanities and Social Sciences Department
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur
New RA Tower IIT Kanpur
Kalyanpur, 208016, U.P. India
+91 9455694240
meha@iitk.ac.in

A Cultural and Embedded Approach to Mathematical Learning

Keywords: Mathematical Learning; Cultural Aspects; Embedded Cognition; Society

There has not been any other discipline of knowledge, where the human and social aspect is as
ignored as it is the case with the discipline of mathematics. Consequently, the study of
mathematics in schools has become dry and boring. Even today, for many students of
mathematics, anxieties related to mathematics develop in a phobia of mathematics.
Philosophers, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, researchers in artificial intelligence all
have tried to address this problem. We argue that the new trends in cognitive science, and
cultural turn in philosophy and education of mathematics, are compatible and complementary
with each other. Mathematics can be considered as a subject matter for both the cognitive and the
cultural perspectives. Both the approaches are trying to imagine the individual as situated being
in a historical, social and cultural environment. Both approaches emphasize upon the interaction
of individual with his surrounding environment for the development of mathematical learning.
We are living in an interdisciplinary age where each problem can be investigated from the
various perspectives. Continuing this interdisciplinary approach, we have tried to borrow insights
from philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and artificial intelligence. The
motivation for the paper comes from desire to make mathematics more human than alien. It is
only possible if we are able to instill the social and cultural aspect to the learning of mathematics