To Uncover Multicultural Psychological Aspects of Phenomena of Mathematics Education

Banks and Banks (1995) define multicultural education that "Multicultural education is a field of study and an emerging discipline whose major aim is to create equal educational opportunities for students from diverse racial, ethnic, social-class, and cultural groups. One of its important goals is to help all students to acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to function effectively in a pluralistic democratic society and to interact, negotiate, and communicate with peoples from diverse groups in order to create a civic and moral community that works for the common good."

The effort of some university in the world especially the member of APEC held a meeting for sharing about the problem of mathematics and the solution that appear in each country. The last meeting hold in Ubon, Thailand. The theme of the last meeting is “Innovation on Problem Solving Based Mathematics Textbook and E-Textbooks”.

One of the participant is Mr. Marsigit from Indonesia. He is observer, presentator as a specialist researcher  and commentator in this meeting. He as observer in the first elementary class observe what the teacher and the student doing in teaching-learning process. There are some student and one teacher as the participant of the show of teaching-learning process. The first step, the tacher explain about the problem, the student must count the dragonfly. The next step is students make a group. Each group consist of four students. They work together and discuss about how many picture of dragonfly that given. The students use different ways to count the dragonfly. After the students discuss the problem the next step is speaking. They speak what did they do when they want to count the dragonfly. There is a problem when the teacher use a teaching aid to explain how they count the dragonfly. The teaching aid is difficult to understand by the students.

The potentials of human are like iceberg. They don’t appear in the surface but hide in the deep ocean. The teachers must be stimulus for their students, so the students can improve their ability and finally the potential that they have can be appear in their life. It’s the function of teacher for the students.
In principle, mathematical activities carried out as problem solving. That is, they are a sequence starting with generating wonder and question, formulating problems, understanding the problem, planning, implementing, and reflecting on the solution process. The first, the students are generating wonder and question. If the students feel wonder about the material, they will ask question about it. Then after ask the question, they will be formulating the problems by formalizing them. The next, student will understanding the problem. If the student understand with the problem, they will have a planning to solve it. Then the student will be implementing the formula that they have to solve the problem. And the last but not least, students will be  reflecting on the solution process. The more important thing is that the end of a problem solving must be start for next challenge.

Problem solving can be given to the student by lesson study in the class. The paper of Soledad A.Ulep from University of the Philippines National Institute explain about lesso study in his paper. The title of Ulep’s paper is  Transforming a Mathematics Textbook Practical Work Activity Into a Problem-Solving Task Through Lesson Study. This paper describes how through lesson study, a group of high school mathematics teachers with the author as facilitator transformed a mathematics textbook practical work activity to introduce polynomial function. The activity would make students follow a set of procedures in order to get a desired outcome which would be the basis for developing the concept of polynomial function. In order to elicit more thinking from the students as they learned polynomial function, the lesson study group transformed the activity into a problem that required students to devise their own method of making the desired outcome.

The nature of lesson study are experience and thinking. The lesson study will be implemented if the students have experience in their life. The students will fell difficult without experience in their mind. Then thinking is the second one, the student think about many thing in the material. Thinking is process to get new concept, to solve a problem and to make life better than before.

There are three big problem in education field. The first is the challenge of integrating students perspectives into teaching practice. This problem is same with how students can be actor of education if the student just be passive actor in the teaching-learning process? The second is the gap between theories or research and practices. The teories can’t be application directly in the human life. There is a distance between teories and practice because the researcher didn’t think the real life. The last is the lack of learning theories on teacher and educations. The teacher is lack of learning theories so they can’t teach the student by the right way. So, the proffesional in the teaching and eduacation must form a new theories to improve the learning theories that had been had.

Psychology of learning Mathematics is used as the based to develop model and learning design of mathematics object.  Model of mathematics object between one student and the others is different. It caused of different psychology of the student. Different class and different age will influent the psychology that the students have.

Expectation of Mathematics activities is the student can solve the problem by own way. In the picture below explain the process of mathematics learning. It’s just connection between Procedural or generating with proving and connection between conceptualizing with problem solving.

Refference
http://www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/educatrs/presrvce/pe3lk1.htm.
Mr.Marsigit Experience.
The paper of Soledad A. Ulep University of the Philippines National with title TRANSFORMING A MATHEMATICS TEXTBOOK PRACTICAL WORK ACTIVITY INTO A PROBLEM-SOLVING TASK THROUGH LESSON STUDY.