EL MERCADO IN LATINO PRIMARY MATH CLASSROOMS

Karen C. Fuson and Ana Maria Lo Cicero

Northwestern University

fuson@northwestern.edu

We sought to clarify the potential and the limitations of an ethnomathematical perspective through an analysis of attributes of successful mathematical learning outside of school (e.g., Nunes, 1992; Saxe, 1991) and an analysis of our work in U.S. urban Spanish-speaking Grade 1 and Grade 2 classrooms focused heavily on aspects of buying and selling situations (“El Mercado”). We sought to ascertain what previous experiences children had in this area (e.g., over half of one second-grade Spanish-speaking class had previous experience in Mexico or in the U.S. selling things with their family) and then designed classroom experiences that related to these experiences. Our theoretical perspective combined a constructivist view of learning as individual meaning making by each participant, a Vygotskiian view of teaching as assisting the performance of learners by adapting to the perspective of the learner while helping the learner move toward more culturally adapted conceptions, and an ethnomathematical and “funds of knowledge” (Moll et al., 1992) view of searching for experiences in children’s lives to which school content could be related to form coherence and meaning.

We found that both first and second graders possessed robust "mercado scripts" that enabled them to engage in buying and selling pair activities. Playing mercado worked well as a classroom activity structure. Children enthusiastically and creatively role-played buying and selling and embellished with talk, objects, and physical actions the basic situations given to them in various ways to make them socially detailed and personal. The use of money was positively charged for childen and also created sustained involvement even in activities outside the buying/selling pairs. There were also substantial limitations in the buying/selling situations as sources of learning. Complexities included difficult features of coins and bills, counting these different quantities in the face of obstructive features, and inadequate understanding of aspects of giving “change”. In the real world the nonmathematical aspects of buying/selling are more salient and obvious than are the mathematical aspects. Thus, much work must be done in the mathematics classroom to support children’s construction and use of the quantities involved in money.