Potential of Collaboration Between History and Mathematics Teachers: Emperical Investigation

One of the difficulties inter alia connected to the incorporation of history of mathematics in mathematics education is the failure to take into consideration the fact that history of mathematics is both history and mathematics, that it is a venture involving two disciplines, each with its own set of presuppositions and practices (e.g. Fried 2001, 2014). It thus needs to be viewed educationally under the set of ideas connected to disciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, and, ultimately, transdisciplinarity. These, in turn, can be seen as kinds of collaboration between disciplines. With that in mind, a program was set up involving mathematics and history teachers in the Arab sector of Israel. Participants in the program studied a text by the 10th century Islamic mathematician Abu al-Wafa’ al-Buzjani and worked together to design a teaching unit for students incorporating history into the mathematics classroom and, perhaps, mathematics into the history classroom.