Methodological Difficulties in Research on Indigenous Mathematical Thinking and its Paradoxical Mathematics Education

Abstract

The objective of this research was to determine what are the main challenges facing the researcher investigating ethnomathematics when indigenous and mathematical thinking is foreign to the community. The methodology used to establish this, was to analyze documentary research, with reference to many of the texts produced in Colombia. This analysis allowed us to emerge categories classified as difficulties. It was concluded that these difficulties are the product of lack of training in qualitative ethnographic research, which does not allow the researcher to identify the research design and in the same phases of execution power relations, the interpretation of the other (the Indian) and its relationship with the modern world, which can lead to enforcement proceedings or an artificial discussion of a nonexistent mathematical thought in the reality of the indigenous community and which has an impact on mathematical education.

Keywords:
Research methodological errors; Ethnomathematics; Indigenous thinking; Interpretation of the other