ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses a proposal for research and practice in the teaching and learning of geometry at the secondary level. It reviews historical and epistemological aspects of the curriculum, issues of thinking and learning and of teaching and teachers' knowledge, in order to land on a set of proposals for geometry instruction. The twentieth century saw important educational reforms that brought with them curricular innovation; it also made room for the growth of research in mathematics education and related fields that attended in particular to geometry. Geometry had been a field of study from antiquity, and its place in the curriculum had been warranted on cultural transmission grounds. Geometry itself had been conceived in relation to the Euclidean canon, even if the texts used to expound on it had included deviations from Euclid's Elements.