Educ Stud Math (2007) 66:131–143

DOI 10.1007/s10649-006-9070-0

Teacher education through the history of mathematics

Fulvia Furinghetti

Published online: 16 February 2007

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract In this paper I consider the problem of designing strategies for teacher education
programs that may promote an aware style of teaching. Among the various elements to be
considered I focus on the need to address prospective teachers’ belief that they must
reproduce the style of mathematics teaching seen in their school days. Towards this aim, I
argue that the prospective teachers need a context allowing them to look at the topics they
will teach in a different manner. This context may be provided by the history of
mathematics. In this paper I shall discuss how history affected the construction of teaching
sequences on algebra during the activities of the ‘laboratory of mathematics education’
carried out in a 2 year education program for prospective teachers. The conditions of the
experiment, notably the fact that our prospective teachers had not had specific preparation
in the history of mathematics, allow us to outline opportunities and caveats of the use of
history in teacher education.

Key words history of mathematics . mathematics teacher education . cognitive root .

evolutionary mode . situated mode

The difference between us and the pupils entrusted to our care lies only in this, that we
have traveled a longer tract of the parabola of life. If the pupils do not understand, the
fault is with the teacher who does not know how to explain. Nor does it do any good
to load the responsibility onto the lower schools. We must take the pupils as they are,
and recall what they have forgotten, or studied under a different nomenclature. If the
teacher torments his students, and instead of winning their love, he arouses hatred
against himself and the science he teaches, not only will his teaching be negative, but
the necessity of living with so many little enemies will be a continual torment for him.
Each makes his own fortune, good or bad. Who causes his own troubles, cries alone.
So said Jove, as Homer reported (Odyssey, I, 34). With these principles, dear reader
and colleague, may you live happily.
(the mathematician Peano, 1924)

F. Furinghetti (*)
Dipartimento Di Matematica, Università Di Genova, Via Dodecaneso 35, Genova 16146, Italy
e-mail: furinghe@dima.unige.it
132 F. Furinghetti

Dewey said somewhere that subject matter is a prime source of pedagogical insights.
Almost no educators really believe this, I think, except in the trivial sense of hoping
that teachers, textbooks writers, and curriculum designers ‘know their mathematics’.
Even many mathematicians, who ought to know better, have no interest in looking
below the instrumental or formal surface of mathematics in order to get clues about
how to present it more effectively.
(the mathematics educator Wheeler, 1989, pp. 282–283)
Any embryo of sciences presents this double aspect: monster as a fetus; marvel as a germ.
(the historian Gino Loria, unknown source)

1 Introduction

This paper deals with the problem of designing strategies for teacher education programs.
The three quotations at the beginning of the paper should direct the reader’s attention to the
three main issues at stake: knowledge for teaching, view of mathematics and its teaching,
history of mathematics in mathematics teaching.
Borko et al. (1992) have pointed out that ‘knowledge for teaching’ is comprised of
‘subject matter knowledge’ and ‘pedagogical matter knowledge’. There is a third emerging
component, that is teachers’ beliefs about mathematics and its teaching, whose importance
in shaping instructional practice is widely recognized, (see Leder, Pehkonen & Törner,
2002, Thompson, 1992). Cooney (1999, p. 168) has noted that “Preservice teachers come to
teacher education programs with notions about what constitutes teaching. Not surprisingly,
their view of the teaching of mathematics is, more or less, consistent with the way they
experienced learning mathematics.” The consequence of this is that “their learning
experiences often counter current reform efforts in mathematics education”. Analogously
Skott (2001) found that the novice teacher he studied specifically referred to experiences
from his own upper secondary education. To combat this situation teacher education
programs need to offer challenging situations that help to elaborate personal and meditated
beliefs about mathematics and its teaching. One of the suggestions (Thompson, 1992) is the
introduction of courses in the history of mathematics.
The history of mathematics is not a new issue in teacher education programs, see
(Schubring et al., 2000). The way history has been employed for this purpose has varied and
has led to different outputs. In some cases, as discussed in (Heiede, 1996), the presence of
history consisted simply in delivering a course in the history of mathematics with the aim of
giving a historical background to teachers’ mathematics knowledge, as advocated by many
researchers, Freudenthal (1981) for one. In other cases, (see Arcavi, Bruckheimer, & Ben-Zvi,
1982, 1987; Swetz, 1995), packages of historical materials focused on mathematical concepts
difficult to teach were used to deepen teachers’ pedagogical reflection on these concepts.
Some studies, (see Hsieh, C.-J. & Hsieh, F.-J., 2000; Hsieh, 2000; Philippou & Christou,
1998a, b), paid particular attention to the link between history and mathematics teachers’
beliefs and attitudes about mathematics. The overall conclusion drawn by the designers of the
courses in which history was used is that teachers’ preparation may have benefits from
historical knowledge. A few studies, (see Fraser & Koop, 1978; Stander, 1991), report no
significant difference in teacher preparation after the use of historical materials.
In my opinion, the different conclusions drawn by the various authors are not to be
ascribed to the role of the history of mathematics in teacher education, but to the way of
Teacher education through the history of mathematics 133

dealing with history in teacher education programs. The outputs of these programs are not
‘method-free’, that is to say the history of mathematics presented in these courses may have
a different influence in teacher education according to the method that has been used to
insert it into the program.
In this paper I refer to an education program for prospective teachers in which the
history of mathematics was introduced not per se, but as a mediator of knowledge for
teaching. The aim was to make the participants reflect on the meaning of mathematical
objects through experiencing historical moments of their construction. It was intended that
this reflection would promote an appropriation of meaning for teaching mathematical
objects that counteracts the passive reproduction of the style of mathematics teaching the
prospective teachers have experienced as students.

2 To experience the construction of mathematical objects through history

The arguments that support the use of history in the classroom apply – with some
adaptations to the different context – also to the case of teacher education. They may be
summarized by the sentence of Thomas (2002, p. 46), according to which “Mathematical
facts, without some understanding of why they are the way they are, are almost impossible
to learn.” Another reason quoted in the literature for using history in mathematics education
is the fact that history promotes cultural understanding. As Jahnke et al. (2000, p. 292) put
it: “Integrating history in mathematics invites us to place the development of mathematics
in the scientific and technological context of a particular time and in the history of ideas and
society, and also to consider the history of teaching mathematics from perspectives that lie
outside the established disciplinary subject boundaries.” They also mention replacement,
since “Integrating history in mathematics replaces the usual with something different: it
allows mathematics to be seen as an intellectual activity, rather than as just a corpus of
knowledge or a set of techniques.” The cultural understanding and replacement promoted by
history have some link with the need to humanize mathematics education that is often advocated
in the literature, (see Bidwell, 1993; Brown, 1996). This link is outlined by Tymoczko (1994,
p. 335) as follows: “To introduce students to humanistic mathematics is to introduce them to a
human adventure, an adventure that humans have actually partaken of in history.”
I ascribe great importance to the enrichment of the view of mathematics provided by
cultural understanding and replacement; nevertheless in this paper I am more concerned
with a third aspect – reorientation – which is strictly linked to the aim of making the
prospective teachers experience again the construction of mathematical objects. According
to Jahnke et al. (2000, p. 292) “Integrating history in mathematics challenges one’s
perceptions through making the familiar unfamiliar. [...] The history of mathematics has the
virtue of ‘astonishing with what comes of itself’ [...].” To walk in the foreign and unknown
landscape provided by history forces us to look around in a different manner and brings to
light elements which otherwise would escape. In such a context one better grasps the roots
around which the mathematical concepts were built over the centuries. Through
reorientation the learners involved in the process (in our case prospective teachers) are
forced to find their own path towards the appropriation of meaning of mathematical objects.
I point out that here ‘meaning’ has two dimensions: meaning of mathematical objects and
meaning of objects to be taught.
I see a strict relation between the roots of concepts identified by history and the
cognitive roots of concepts described by Tall (2003) as concepts which are (potentially)
meaningful to the student at the time, yet contain the seeds of cognitive expansion to formal
134 F. Furinghetti

definitions and later theoretical development. Tall (2003) mentions three representational
worlds: embodied, symbolic-proceptual, formal-axiomatic. These three worlds encompass
different modes of operating, which Tall put in relation with Bruner’s modes of mental
representation. Though the term ‘embodied’ is used in a number of different ways within
contemporary cognitive science, it may be said that all researchers “share a focus on the
intimate relation between cognition, mind, and living bodily experience in the world, that
is, on the ways in which complex adaptive behavior emerges from physical experience in
biologically-constrained systems”. (Núñez, Edwards, & Matos, 1999, p. 49) The term
‘embodied’ is used by Tall (2003, p. 4) “to refer to thought built fundamentally on sensory
perception as opposed to symbolic operation and logical deduction. This gives to the term
‘embodied’ a more focused meaning in mathematical thinking”. The symbolic-proceptual
world refers to the triad ‘concept, process acting on it, symbol as a pivot between the two’.
In school the mathematical objects are often approached in the second, or, even worst, in
the third world. About this fact Skemp (1969) claims that a purely logical approach
provides only the final product of the mathematical discovery and does not generate in the
learner the processes by which mathematical discoveries are made, so that such an approach
teaches the mathematical thought, not the mathematical thinking. When mathematics is
presented in a polished and finished way the learners (both in school and in teacher
education courses) have difficulties in identifying the cognitive roots of concepts in the
magma of processes, concepts, and rules they have at their disposal. The embodied world is
a suitable place to start the construction of mathematical objects, it is the world where
the “somatic” understanding mentioned in Tang (2004) may happen. History provides
the means to work in this world, as shown in examples such as the introduction of the
derivative in Gravemeijer and Doorman (1999).

3 The experiment

Our experiment is set in a prospective teacher education program aimed at specializing in

teaching mathematics, physics or both. An official diploma certifies the specialization. The
full program lasts two academic years; it is centered on courses in pedagogy, psychology,
information and communication technology, mathematics education, laboratory of
mathematics education, physics education, laboratory of physics education. In the second
year there are courses on foundations of mathematics, on foundations of physics, on history
of mathematics, on history of physics. In the program the prospective teachers spend some
weeks in practical training in school assisted by an experienced teacher: at the beginning
simply as observers and afterwards also acting as teachers (they assign tasks, deliver
lectures, assess students’ performances).
Most participants have no teaching experience. They are graduates in scientific or
technological disciplines (most in mathematics); thus it may be assumed that they have a
strong preparation in the content of the disciplines they will teach, in particular, in
mathematics. Preliminary interviews carried out at the beginning of the training program
have confirmed what was noted in Section 1: they already have some beliefs about
mathematics and its teaching and, in particular, they have difficulties in considering ways of
teaching a given mathematical topic other than the way that they have seen in their school
days. Usually they had formal teaching in school and the university courses have stressed
this side of their subject matter preparation. When they attend the theoretical lectures on
mathematics education they have difficulties in appreciating the usefulness and applicability
Teacher education through the history of mathematics 135

of the educational theories. A good environment for overcoming this scant interest at the
beginning of the program and for linking theory and practice is the seven credits (= 42 h)
course carried out in the first semester of the first year called “Laboratory of mathematics
education”. In this course the theoretical notions of mathematics education and pedagogy
have to be applied to practice: the participants are requested to produce teaching sequences
suitable for the classroom under the guidance of an instructor. Physically the laboratory of
mathematics education is carried out in a computer laboratory so that the participants may
use information technology including the Internet. Moreover the disposition of desks and
chairs allows peer discussions among participants and with the instructor.
In the case here presented there were 15 participants. They prepared a teaching sequence
on algebra for 9th–10th grade students. They worked in groups of three assisted and
prompted by their instructor. The instructor was an experienced teacher with a good
background in research in mathematics education and in history of mathematics. These
qualities were fundamental for carrying out the experiment successfully.
The activity with history on which I focus in this paper concerns the work preparatory to
the design of teaching sequences; the aim of this preparatory work was to acquaint
prospective teachers with the cognitive roots of the concepts and processes that their
potential students will meet in algebra. This integration of history in the laboratory of
mathematics education does not require that the teaching sequences produced by the
participants encompass historical parts, rather it requires that history is an inspirer of
strategies of teaching.
The phases of the experiment were:
(1) Analysis of the national mathematical programs from elementary school up to the last
year of high school. The aim of this activity was not only to familiarize the participants
with the content to be taught and with the methodologies suggested by the guidelines
of the Ministry of Education, but also to identify the continuity through the different
school levels. The participants chose a theme (in our case it was algebra) and followed
its evolution in the successive grades of the programs. They also looked at some
textbooks commonly used in Italian schools to confront the official guidelines of the
Ministry of Education with school practice. The instructor helped them, since they were
able to identify the mathematical topics, but not the skills required to develop them nor
the presence of these skills across the different themes of the programs. In this phase
the orientation towards the passive reproduction of what they had seen in their practice
emerged. They tended to work without attending to the context in which they will act
as teachers. For this reason it was necessary to recall the educational literature on
algebra discussed in the theoretical courses of mathematics education, see (Bednarz,
Kieran, & Lee, 1996; Puig, 2004; Radford, 2000; Schoenfeld & Arcavi, 1988).
(2) Exploiting the history of mathematics for analysing mathematical concepts. After the
analysis of the programs, the prospective teachers started to work in the history of
mathematics. The aim of this phase was to foster the identification of the cognitive roots
of algebra through the lens of history. The main steps in the history of algebra had been
previously outlined by the instructor and afterwards the prospective teachers had at their
disposal manuals on the history of mathematics, readers with original sources translated
into their first language, and internet resources. The participants had to work hard, firstly
to identify the periods and the authors in the history of algebra which were relevant to
their purpose, and afterwards to analyse the selected materials to identify the cognitive
roots and their development. This was the phase where the prospective teachers could
live again the experience of constructing mathematical objects.
136 F. Furinghetti

(3) Design of the teaching sequence. The sequences designed by the prospective teachers
must fill the programs’ requirements and be suitable to the relevant school level.
Within each group the prospective teachers discussed the historical materials they
found and their relationship to the mathematical topic they intended to teach in their
sequence. The instructor stimulated them to work in strict contact with the classroom
context in which their sequence was to be set and intervened with advice and the
confrontation of their opinions. The prospective teachers were encouraged to apply the
notions taught in the theoretical courses of mathematics education and pedagogy. At
the end of the laboratory they were given the opportunity to propose segments of the
sequences they had produced to volunteer pupils and to test their reactions.
(4) Discussion among groups and confrontation of the produced sequences. In this phase
the focus went back from history to the classroom in order to discuss how the
cognitive roots may be developed in the teaching sequence. There was an exchange of
ideas and new questions were raised. New ideas were generated spontaneously by the
discussion, as advocated by Simon (1994).
In describing our experiment we cannot ignore the problem of our prospective teachers’
preparation in the history of mathematics. History is introduced in our course as an artifact.
According to Verillon and Rabardel (1995) an artifact becomes a tool when the users are able
to use it for their own aims. It is obvious that in the case of the artifact ‘history’ teachers need
to know something about the history of mathematics. The extent and the deepness of
knowledge have consequences in the use of history for teaching. Those who know history
through secondary sources such as treatises on the history of mathematics are likely to
reproduce the view of the author of treatises instead of developing their own view and, in
addition, they make their choice under the influence of the choices made by the experts.
Many researchers (see Arcavi & Bruckheimer, 2000; Jahnke et al., 2000) recommend the use
of original sources for better grasping the roots of concepts. There are even more integralist
positions: Jahnke (1994) advocates that teachers need to know how research in the history of
mathematics is performed.
In practice, there is the need for mediating different positions. In our course the historical
preparation of the participants was not homogeneous: only a few of them had attended
university courses on history of mathematics. The course in the history of mathematics
contemplated in the education program is short (21 h) and is delivered in the second year,
after the laboratory discussed here. To homogenize the audience the instructor provided the
prospective teachers with different kinds of sources (for example, treatises and readers of
history, web addresses, and handouts) to be explored under her guidance for producing the
required teaching sequence. The participants had to look for information, to choose among
different sources, to interpret original historical passages, to evaluate many elements, and to
make their own choices. One may say that they were forced to reproduce in a minor way
the work of historians. This activity introduced a sense of community of practice among the
prospective teachers and made them accept the collaboration inside the groups, between
groups, and with the instructor.

4 Comments

As a result of the activities in the laboratory of mathematics education our prospective

teachers produced different kinds of materials: plans for teaching sequences, exercises and
problems, reports on the experimentation with segments of the teaching sequences they
Teacher education through the history of mathematics 137

planned for the classroom. History affected their products in two modes. One mode, that we
may term ‘evolutionary’, consisted in looking at the evolution of a given concept through the
centuries. Reading some treatises on the history of mathematics and some histories of algebra
found on the Internet fostered this mode. This mode offered to our prospective teachers the
opportunity of identifying the elements that made a certain stream of thinking dominant. The
historian Parshall (1988) uses the metaphor taken from Darwin’s theory to explain why
Viète’s algebra, based on the generality of the method of analysis, supplanted its predecessors
(Diophantus’ and geometrical algebra). The reflection on the different streams in the
development of algebra brings to the fore the power of the winner, that is the main ideas of
algebraic method that shape modern presentation.
An example of the result of this mode of using history in the laboratory of mathematics
education is the plan for working in the classroom on second degree equations produced by
a group of three teachers, see Fig. 1. This schematization was accompanied by an
explanation. The ideas our prospective teachers took from history for designing their plan
may be summarized as follows:
& History provides meaningful examples of algorithms and methods that allow
exploitation of the operational nature of mathematical objects
& History suggests the development of the concepts in a visual/perceptual environment
such as that provided by geometry.
The other mode with which history affected prospective teachers’ products was mainly
raised by reading original passages of selected historical authors. I use the term ‘situated’ to
describe this mode because the cognition was situated in the historical context so that it was
possible to understand the reasoning of the mathematicians who contributed to the
development of concepts. With the situated mode one recovers the cognitive roots through
the historical roots and avoids sticking only to the polished theory that comes at the end of
the evolutionary process.

Second degree equations

(1) Second degree equations (2) Graphical (3) Algebraic

as a historical process representation in the properties
Cartesian plane
(1) Second degree equazions as a historical process
Second degree Geometric Diophantus Al-Khwarizmi’s Viète and
equations in algebra in solving formula Horner
Mesopotamia Greece method
(2) Graphical representation in the Cartesian plane
Second degree Solutions in Algebraic Ancient problems
equations and the Cartesian manipulations for translated into
graphics of parabolas plane finding the modern
solving formula formalism
(3) Algebraic properties
Short notes on complex solutions and the fundamental Factorization
theorem of algebra
Fig. 1 Plan for working in the classroom on second degree equations
138 F. Furinghetti

In the following I give two examples of the activities promoted by reading original
sources to approach the passage from arithmetic to algebra. Problems taken from medieval
treatises of arithmetic were presented to teachers. The first set of problems was taken from
the collection of 53 problems titled Propositiones ad acuendos juvenes (Problems to
sharpen the young) written by Alcuin of York during the time of Charlemagne. A reliable
translation of the original Latin text into Italian was available (Franci, 2005), so that the
difficulty of interpreting an unknown language was avoided. Note that, here and in the
other medieval problems considered the authors give empirical (numerical) solutions,
sometimes without explaining the way they arrived to their solution. One of the problems
discussed by the participants was the following (Hadley & Singmaster, 1992, p. 120):
39. De quodam emptore in oriente – An oriental merchant
A man in the east wanted to buy 100 assorted animals for 100 shillings. He ordered
his servant to pay 5 shillings for a camel, one shilling for an ass and one shilling for 20
sheep. How many camels, asses, and sheep did he buy?
Solution. Five nineteens are 95, that is, 19 camels are bought for 95 shillings, being
five nineteens. Add another one, that is buy one ass for one shilling, making 96
[shillings]. Then four twenties are 80, so for four shillings buy 80 sheep. Then add 19
and 1 and 80 making 100. So there are 100 animals. And add 95 and 1 and 4, making
100 shillings. So there are both 100 animals and 100 shillings.
Our prospective teachers quickly produced the following equations in the unknowns c (camels),
a (asses), s (sheep): c þ a þ s ¼ 100 and 5c þ a þ s=20 ¼ 100. I feel that they could have
considered this problem a variation of the so-called realistic mathematics problems if the
solution provided by Alcuin had not puzzled them. They were asked to discuss how students
might react to the translation of this problem from the verbal form to the algebraic form of
equation. The struggle of the author around his numerical solution shed light on one of the
main differences between arithmetic and algebra. Arithmetic goes from known (here numbers
and numerical attempts) to unknown (the sought solutions), while algebra goes from
unknown to known. Thus algebra has to be seen not just as a generalization of arithmetic, but
rather as a change in the method of work, which is applied when one starts the solving
process by naming c, a, s the unknowns. Since this method is the core of algebra, our
prospective teachers came back to work on this method: they read some of Al-Khwarizmi’s
passages about the solution of second degree equations. This author uses a geometrical
method of ‘cutting and pasting’ squares and rectangles. It is notable that he begins his
explanation with this sentence (Al-Khwarizmi, 1831, p. 13):
The figure to explain this, the sides of which are unknown. It represents the square,
the which, or the root of which, you wish to know. This is the figure AB, each side of
which may be considered as one of its roots.
Al-Khwarizmi’s method is close to the analytical method, because this initial assumption
that the equation he wishes to solve is satisfied.
Another aspect of Alcuin’s problem that puzzled our prospective teachers was the fact that
the role of variables and unknowns is shuffled. Initially c, a, s are unknown, but at the end c
and s play the role of variables in the relation 80c=19s. This brought our prospective teachers
to reflect on issues that they have underestimated, for example the ambiguity of the two roles
and the fact that understanding the role of variables “provides the basis for the transition from
the arithmetic to algebra and is necessary for the meaningful use of all advanced mathematics”
(see Schoenfeld & Arcavi, 1988, p. 420). They conjectured that the solution given in the old
Teacher education through the history of mathematics 139

text comes from a table of values made by Alcuin and easily linked the solutions of this
problem with graphical representations in the Cartesian plane. The teaching sequence
generated by this exercise was enhanced by a set of word problems similar to the problem of
the oriental merchant conceived with the aim of providing pupils with situations that link the
translation into algebraic language with the discussion of the graphical representations.
Another activity concerned Problem 47 from the medieval treatise of arithmetic by
Dell’Abbaco (1964) [here presented in my translation]:
A gentleman asked his servant to bring him seven apples from the garden. He said:
“You will meet three doorkeepers and each of them will ask you for half of all apples
plus two taken from the remaining apples.” How many apples must the servant pluck
if he wishes to have seven apples left?
In the original version the problem is written in an old fashioned Italian language with
words and syntax which are no longer used in the modern language. The solution is given
in the style used in the previous problem by Alcuin, through numerical calculations without
explanation. Our prospective teachers solved and discussed the problem; afterwards they
were asked to propose the problem to a ninth grade pupil in order to observe the reactions.
The following are excerpts of the report provided by a prospective teacher who gave the
problem to a girl (Giulia) who was studying algebra in school (she knew how to solve first
degree equations).
After a first initial panic, Giulia reads carefully the text and draws a naïve figure (Fig. 2).
She reflects and concludes that the symbols introduced to explain the statement are not
helping her. Thus she shifts to a numerical example. She takes 50 apples performing
the following calculations
50
þ 2 ¼ 27
2
50 27 ¼ 23
23
þ 2 ¼ 13:5
2
23 13:5 ¼ 9:5

Without completing her reasoning Giulia realizes that the apples are not enough. But
her calculations are not useless since they suggest the “abstract” [word used by Giulia]
equations that may be useful to solve. She writes

x
þ2¼a
x 2 
x þ2 ¼y
2
y
þ2¼b
y 2 
y þ2 ¼z
2
z
þ2¼c
z 2 
z þ2 ¼7
2
140 F. Furinghetti

and explains that:

x total number of apples that the servant must pluck
a the number of apples that the servant must give to the first doorkeeper
y total of apples left to the servant after the first doorkeeper
b the number of apples that the servant must give to the second doorkeeper
z total number of apples left to the servant after the second doorkeeper
c the number of apples that the servant must give to the third doorkeeper
7 total number of apples left to the servant after meeting the third doorkeeper and that
the servant must bring to the gentleman.

At this point Giulia is bewildered since she has not studied how to solve systems of
equations. The prospective teacher suggests that Giulia start from the last equation that
she is able to solve and afterwards suggests applying the same method to the preceding
equations. Giulia goes on to solve the remaining equations without further help.

z 
z þ2 ¼7
2
z
z 2¼7
2
z
z 2þ2¼7þ2
2
z
z¼9
2
 z
2⋅ z ¼ 9⋅2
2
2z z ¼ 18
z ¼ 18

[Here the further calculations, carried out in an analogous way, for finding x and y are
not reported]. Eventually Giulia finds that the solution is “84 apples”. She is not
completely satisfied, since she feels that 84 apples are too many and thus she verifies
as follows the correctness of the result

84
þ 2 ¼ 44ð¼ aÞ
2
84 44 ¼ 40ð¼ yÞ
40
þ 2 ¼ 22ð¼ bÞ
2
40 22 ¼ 18ð¼ zÞ
18
þ 2 ¼ 11ð¼ cÞ
2
18 11 ¼ 7

I have observed that the unusual form of the statement of the problem (unusual words,
unusual syntax) has obliged the pupil to carefully read the text and to reflect on it, so
Teacher education through the history of mathematics 141

x x x
+2 +2 +2
2 2 2

Fig. 2 Giulia’s iconic translation of the problem

that the interpretation of the text has been more accurate in comparison to what
usually happens. The ‘curious’ problem raised the need of a naïve figure, which
supported the understanding of the statement of the problem. Even if Giulia is
studying first degree equations in school, her initial attempt follows the arithmetic
pattern from the known (numbers) to the unknown. After the initial failure she goes to
algebra and arrives at the solution. I deem that Giulia’s calculations for finding z are
not mere applications of the algebraic rules, but devices suggested to the pupil by the
need to make the calculations simpler.
These excerpts show the prospective teacher’s effective commitment in observing the
pupil’s behavior. They were presented to the entire class of prospective teachers for a
discussion of the way in which pupils give meaning to the concepts of unknown and of the
analytic method on which algebra is based. These excerpts were also used to discuss with
the prospective teachers the weakness of the recapitulation law as a guide for teaching.
Giulia’s behavior is evidence for an interchange between the pupil’s learning and the setting
in which the learning takes place.
Afterwards other primary sources – by Viète, Descartes – were used to deepen
understanding of the concepts and the methods of algebra. The situated mode promoted by
the use of primary historical sources improved the reflection on how to teach concepts such
as unknowns, variables and the relation arithmetic–algebra, by setting them in the historical
context where their laborious gestation was taking place. Thus our prospective teachers
were reoriented in the sense explained in Section 2.

5 Concluding remarks

I would like to point out that there is a side effect of the strategy carried out in our
laboratory of mathematics education for prospective teachers: the participants were
provided with motivation to learn some history of mathematics. But this was not our
primary aim: our aim was to situate the participants’ beliefs on mathematics and its teaching
in a context suitable to arouse an ‘aware way of teaching’. The process, which leads to the
design of a didactic sequence in the laboratory, may be summarized as follows:
& Reading the programs of mathematics
& Reading history in the evolutionary mode
& Singling out the cognitive roots of the concepts
142 F. Furinghetti

& Confronting the cognitive roots in history and in the mathematical programs
through a situated mode of reading history
& Designing the teaching sequence.
This process is not linear. The prospective teachers go back and forth from history (using
evolutionary and situated modes) to the programs (the classroom) and vice versa. The
bridges between the different contexts are the theoretical issues of mathematics education
learnt in the theoretical courses.
At this point the meaning of the three quotations at the beginning should be clear and
how I combined three different contexts (mathematics, history, and education) to shape the
motto and the spirit of this paper. Teachers “make their own good fortune” (Peano’s
quotation) if they realize an aware style of teaching which is based on “looking below the
instrumental or formal surface of mathematics in order to get clues about how to present it
more effectively” (Wheeler’s quotation). There are many ways to acquire an aware style of
teaching. The means discussed in this paper was the history of mathematics, which was
used by looking at old mathematical problems not only as steps in the development of the
mathematical culture, but rather as promoters of powerful insights into the roots of
mathematical knowledge. In this way ideas found in history, even if they are wrong or
incomplete, are “marvels as a germ”, rather than “monsters as a fetus” (Loria’s quotation).

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