AN EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE OF CULTURAL TRANSPOSITION IN PRIMARY SCHOOL: PROBLEMS WITH VARIATION

Abstract

Since several years, politicians, researchers and educators from different countries are debating on possible reasons for the success of Confucian area students in interactional assessment projects (such as PISA). Starting from the study of teaching practices developed in this East area, in Italy we developed an educational research based on the process of cultural transposition (Mellone & Ramploud, 2015). With this term we mean the process of change that develops considering two or more cultural-educational backgrounds with the aim to maintain their differences without “translating” them from one culture to another, but rather highlighting these in order to review their meaning processes and daily use in classrooms. In this article we present two educational experiences developed in a second and fifth grades Italian classroom on the cultural transposition of the pictorial equations approach of the Chinese curriculum inserted in the typical structure of Chinese word problems, called problems with variation (Bartolini Bussi et al., 2013). According to Cai and Knuth (2011) in China this symbolic representation is used since the early school years as a possible support for “constructing” a bridge to the “informal algebra”. In the Russian curriculum it is possible to find an analogous approach called intermediate strategies of graphic representation (Davydov, 1982) referred to similar pictorial equations. Our experience of cultural transposition in the Italian context have shown the potentialities of the use of problems with variation as well as the crucial role of the figural equation.