Analysis of real world problems in mathematics textbooks of early twentieth and twenty-first century Turkish education: political and social reflections¹

¹The earlier version of this study was presented as an oral communication at the 40th International Conference for Psychology of Mathematics Education, Szeged, Hungary.

Abstract

This paper aims to show that historical eras from the perspective of socio-political approaches can be linked to the context of mathematical real world problems in conformity with the eras they were used. Three mathematics high school textbooks were selected from the Hamidian era [1876–1909], Early Republican era [1923–28] and the Contemporary era [2002–]. A content analysis was carried out by taking the political events into consideration and linked them with the context of the problems. The problem contexts were examined under four general categories, military, gender, religion, and work force. Findings of the study indicated that mathematics could be related to socio-political aspects of history.

Acknowledgement

We acknowledge and are grateful for the comments from Ayanna Perry and Oguzhan Dogan that greatly improved the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The earlier version of this study was presented as an oral communication at the 40th International Conference for Psychology of Mathematics Education, Szeged, Hungary.

² The reason for ending the early republican era in 1928 is that the adapted Latin Alphabet replaced the Ottoman Alphabet.

³ Ak¸ura (1976) defines Ottomanism as an effort to create an Ottoman nation that melts all religious, ethnics and racial groups in the same pot.

⁴ In Ataturk's own words nationalism refers to ‘show[ing] respect towards our own character and nationality through our feelings, ideas and actions and with our activities and deeds, ... , a nation which has not found her national identity is a pray to other nations’ (Kili 1969, 82).

⁵ Refersto ‘not merely means separation of state and religion but also the separation of religion from educational, cultural and legal affairs’ (Kili 1969, 103).