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Van Hiele: niveaus van wiskundig denken KU Leuven
Piet Vredenduin: math teacher and more, trait d’union between the Dutch and Flemish mathematics teachers’ communities KU Leuven
Piet Vredenduin (1909–1996) played a prominent role in the Dutch mathematics education community during the second half of the twentieth century: mathematics teacher, mathematics researcher which led him to a dissertation on Fraenkel’s Mengenlehre applied to number theory, author of mathematics textbooks for almost all sections of the secondary mathematics curriculum, mathematics teachers’ educator, participant in two innovating projects: ...
Debates on axiom systems for school geometry during the 1960s: Relating the proposals by Artin, Choquet, Dieudonné and Papy KU Leuven
During the first half of the 1960s, vivid debates on which axiom system is the most suited for teaching geometry in upper grades (15–18-year-olds) took place on a series of international meetings. Jean Dieudonné sparked up these debates with his slogan “Euclid must go!” at the 1959 Royaumont Seminar. In the following years, Dieudonné positioned himself at an extreme position in the discussion about the “best” axiom system for teaching geometry, ...
In search for the early roots of the European Modern Mathematics Movement KU Leuven
The origins of the European modern mathematics movement are to be situated in the early 1950s within the International Commission for the Study and Improvement of Mathematics Teaching. ln 1952, Caleb Gattegno, the actual animator of the Commission, managed to bring the Bourbakists together with the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget on the theme of "mathematical and mental structures." A connection was established between the structures in the work ...
Modern mathematics: An international movement diversely shaped in national contexts KU Leuven
We reflect on the non-parallel origins and development of modern mathematics, as an educational movement, and its American counterpart New Math. The 1959 Royaumont Seminar played a decisive role in bringing together American and European reformers, acted as a catalyst, but did not lead to substantial reform cooperation on either side of the Atlantic. We pay attention to the pluriform nature of the movement(s), shaped by national traditions, ...
The early roots of the European Modern Mathematics Movement: How a model for the science of mathematics became a model for mathematics education KU Leuven
The cradle of modern mathematics in Europe is likely to be traced to the founding meeting of the International Commission for the Study and Improvement of Mathematics Teaching in 1952 in La Rochette par Melun (France). The organizer of that meeting, Caleb Gattegno, had chosen Mathematical and Mental Structures as a theme and succeeded in bringing together several “big names” from the fields of psychology, epistemology, and mathematics, ...
Papy’s reform of mathematics education in Belgium: Development, implementation, and controversy KU Leuven
The modern mathematics movement in Belgium is inextricably linked to Georges Papy, a flamboyant and uncompromising professor of algebra at the Free University of Brussels. From the late 1950s, Papy reshaped the content of secondary school mathematics by basing it upon the unifying themes of sets, relations, and algebraic structures. Meanwhile, he innovated the pedagogy of mathematics by functionally interweaving his rigorous discourse with ...
The mathematical film: Dynamic geometry in the post-War era KU Leuven
From the 1950s, the didactic potential of teaching aids was a main topic of interest within the International Commission for the Study and Improvement of Mathematics Teaching (CIEAEM). In particular, mathematical films that illustrated geometric properties in a dynamic way or explored new topics in geometry education were considered promising didactic tools. In this paper, we reconstruct the former role that mathematical films played in the ...