Culturally Responsive Teaching Through the Adinkra Symbols of Ghana and its Impact on Students' Mathematics Proficiency
Creators: Okyere, Mavis
Publisher: name: University of Alberta Library
Year: 2022

<p>Ghana’s chief examiners, for the core and elective mathematics for the 2016 examinations, suggested that teachers should take the necessary steps to make the teaching of mathematics more practical and related to real-life problems. However, the Ghanaian mathematics curriculum hardly uses real-life or local examples to illustrate mathematics concepts. Educators and researchers of ethnomathematics and culturally responsive pedagogy encourage the inclusion of students’ cultural knowledge in their classroom learning. They stress that students’ culture has a significant influence on their mathematics learning and using students’ cultural background and experiences for mathematics instruction has a positive effect on their learning and their life in general (Bonotto, 2010; Delpit, 1995; Gay, 2010; Sharma &amp; Orey, 2017; Weldeana, 2016). Therefore, this study investigated how the use of culturally responsive teaching through ethnomathematics could impact students’ mathematics learning in a classroom setting.<br>
Ethnomathematics (D’Ambrosio, 1990), culturally responsive pedagogy (Gay, 2010), and a framework of mathematics proficiency (Kilpatrick et al., 2001) informed this design-based research study, which involved the participation of five mathematics teachers. In the first phase of the study, the mathematics teachers and I investigated the mathematics concepts in the images and the creation process of the Adinkra symbols (ethnomathematics). <br>
The result of the study of the Adinkra symbols revealed that there are mathematics concepts that could be gleaned from the images and the craftsmen’s creation process of the Adinkra symbols. The findings also revealed that the investigation of the Adinkra symbols provided an opportunity for teachers to realize the connections between various mathematics concepts.  Again, it enabled mathematics teachers to connect mathematics of the Adinkra symbols to the school curriculum and the teaching and learning of mathematics. The study of the Adinkra symbols also enabled mathematics teachers to develop classroom teaching strategies that were consistent with culturally responsive pedagogy. That is, this phase of the study increased the mathematics teachers’ knowledge base for teaching.<br>
The acquired mathematics knowledge, observed in the Adinkra symbols, was used to design culturally responsive teaching activities for students at the junior and senior high schools in Ghana. Four lessons were designed for the senior high school (SHS) class on the topics: reflection, translation, rotation, and multiple transformations, and four lessons were designed for the junior high (JHS) class on the topics: ratio and proportion, angles, enlargement, and rotation.<br>
To investigate how the use of culturally responsive teaching through ethnomathematics could impact students’ learning, the designed activities were implemented in one JHS class (form two or Grade 8) and one SHS class (form two or Grade 11). The implementation of the activities was guided by culturally responsive pedagogy theory. Some of the culturally responsive pedagogy features employed in the study included: the use of the local language for instruction, students working in small cooperative groups, discussions of the meanings, and social values of the Adinkra symbols, using the images of the Adinkra symbols as mediating tools, and using Adinkra symbols as context for problems/tasks.<br>
The strands of mathematics proficiency of Kilpatrick et al. (2001), which define mathematics learning, namely: conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, strategic competence, adaptive reasoning, and productive disposition, were used to assess students’ learning that occurred during the implementation of the activities designed.<br>
The results revealed that it is viable to implement culturally responsive activities in the classroom using students’ cultural artifacts like the Adinkra symbols as mediating tools to promote students’ learning. All the five strands of mathematics proficiency were observed to have occurred in the lessons, indicating that the use of ethnomathematics and culturally responsive pedagogy indeed promoted students’ mathematics learning. It was observed that the use of the local language and small group work promoted students’ engagement and interactions, which made it possible for all the strands of proficiency to emerge. The use of the Adinkra symbols, as context and as mediating tools, provided models for students to relate the concepts to, and that also motivated them to stay on task, as they experienced the application of mathematics in their own culture. Lastly, not only did the students learn mathematics through the Adinkra symbols, but they also learned social and moral values, and some of the social values they learned could be related to the productive disposition strand of Kilpatrick et al. (2001).</p>