Record Details

‘Eighteen hands high’: A narrative reading of Animal Farm from a mathematical perspective

Pythagoras

 
 
Field Value
 
Title ‘Eighteen hands high’: A narrative reading of Animal Farm from a mathematical perspective
 
Creator Mwale, Liveness Mwakapenda, Willy
 
Subject Mathematics Education; Education; Mathematics Reading mathematically; Animal Farm; mathematical knowledge domains
Description This article addresses the interconnection between two education practices: reading and mathematics. These are two common aspects of schooling. Learners engage with these critical practices, regularly. There hardly goes a day in the life of schoolgoing children without them engaging in these two practices in one form or another. However, the point of this article is to examine how these two practices come together in activities of learning mathematics, and seeing mathematical ideas within the context of reading texts that may be considered non-mathematical. The question we address is: to what extent are high school mathematics learners able to see mathematics in non-mathematical reading texts? We examine this question based on an analysis of research project data collected from South African high school learners’ interactions with Animal Farm, one of the 2015 Grade 10–12 South African English Home Language literature books. The learners were drawn from five schools in three provinces, namely Limpopo, Gauteng and Eastern Cape. In the first phase of data collection, 430 Grade 10–12 learners were purposively sampled to participate in the study. In the second and third phases of the study, 100 out of the 430 learners were purposively sampled. These were learners who had read Animal Farm before the time of data collection. Based on our analysis, we argue that high school mathematics learning and teaching do not adequately prepare learners to be able to see mathematics in spaces that may be isolated from traditional environments in which learners learn mathematics.
 
Publisher AOSIS Publishing
 
Contributor National Research Foundation
Date 2018-11-15
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion — Survey
Format text/html application/epub+zip application/xml application/pdf
Identifier 10.4102/pythagoras.v39i1.403
 
Source Pythagoras; Vol 39, No 1 (2018); 10 pages 2223-7895 1012-2346
 
Language eng
 
Relation
The following web links (URLs) may trigger a file download or direct you to an alternative webpage to gain access to a publication file format of the published article:

https://pythagoras.org.za/index.php/pythagoras/article/view/403/665 https://pythagoras.org.za/index.php/pythagoras/article/view/403/664 https://pythagoras.org.za/index.php/pythagoras/article/view/403/666 https://pythagoras.org.za/index.php/pythagoras/article/view/403/662
 
Coverage — — 18-20 year-old participants
Rights Copyright (c) 2018 Liveness Mwale, Willy Mwakapenda https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0
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