Abstract
THE AUTHOR POSITIONS mathematics as a socially constructed discipline created and maintained through collaborative consensus. The focus on decontextualized symbolic manipulation has transformed the richness of contextualized mathematics from a tool to model aspects of creation to a scheme of logical algorithms that often hold no ultimate meaning for secondary teachers or students. The result is bondage to textbook explanations, exalting acquiescence and indifference. A Christian worldview points to liberation and new life, using mathematics to collaboratively uncover our perceptions, build new understandings, while investigating and exposing the structural beauty and purposes of God's creation and the directional misuses that have distorted our understandings and uses of mathematics.
Subject
Religious studies,Education