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Students of PGSD (Department of Education for
Primary School Teacher in Yogyakarta State
University, Indonesia), as prospective primary school
teachers, should be empowered to teach mathematics
that pay more attention to the cultural values of the
nation and reconnect students to their environments.
Empowering pre-service teachers to teach such
culture-based mathematics should start with infusing
curricula in PGSD with cultural aspects, especially
the integrated concept of culture. Integrated concept
of culture becomes an urgent need because, as we
were preparing our recent study, most PGSD students
appeared to have partial concepts of it.
2 CULTURE IN MATHEMATICS
EDUCATION
2.1 The Meaning of Culture
Robert Kohls in Wintergerst (2011) states that
"Culture is an integrated system of learned behavior
patterns that are characteristic of any given society.
Culture refers to the total way of life of particular
groups of people. It includes everything that a group
of people thinks, says, does, and makes. Its systems
of attitudes and feeling. Culture is learned and
transmitted from generation to generation”. In this
regard, Wintergerst notices that culture can be seen
from different disciplinary perspectives. For
example, anthropologists view culture as the
perspective of human studies. Sociologists view
culture as social relationships between people and
their groups. Psychologists view culture as a
phenomenon related to mind and behavior.
Meanwhile, linguists focus, primarily, on language
practice. To be briefly stated, “Culture is a universal
fact of human life”.
Saifer (2011), goes in the same current as states
that: “culture can be defined as a way of life that
relates to socially transmitted habits, customs,
traditions, and beliefs that characterize a particular
group of people at a particular time”. Culture
influences the way people learn, solve problems, and
teach”. Therefore, learning mathematics in primary
school, as a learning and teaching activity, cannot be
isolated from the existing culture in the student and
teacher environment. Actually, school math aims to
help students overcome the problems they encounter
in their environment using mathematical methods.
Some of the following figures clarify the cultural
significance of mathematics in primary school.
K.H. Dewantara (2013) states that culture is the
fruit of human civilization or human mind. In Bahasa
Indonesia, the word civilization means ‘peradaban’.
Peradaban comes from the root ‘adab’, which means
‘virtue of total nature of human mind’. The researcher
proposes the phrase ‘total nature of human mind’
because that is the way Malay language represents
‘mind’. Mind in Malay culture is ‘budi’, budi is not
limited to cognitive functions of mind, but exceeds it
to the emotional, wills, and even supernatural
functions. To sum it up, culture in Indonesian
perspective is related to civilization, and total
existence experience of man.
According to Dewantara (2013), “all cultures are
orderly, beautiful, useful, sublime, giving a sense of
peace, happy, happy, and so on. Culture is the result
of the struggle of human life”. Dewantara even tries
to explain culture by dividing it into elements, based
on man’s mind functions. According to Dewantara,
human mind encompasses all the movements of
mind, taste, and will, so that culture can be divided
into entities of thought (e.g. science, education and
teaching, philosophy), entities of feeling (e.g. all
noble character, customs, justice, religion, arts,
temples, batik, wicker, wayang and so on), and
entities of will (e.g. agriculture, shipping, buildings,
etc.). Culture never has an everlasting existence, but
is constantly changing because of the changing nature
and the age. Sometimes culture generally benefits
human civilization. Other times, culture may instead
endanger civilization and even life! Therefore, we
may always sustain a sort of critical thought that
enables us to adapt our culture to the ever-changing
demands of contexts surrounding us.
In line with the opinion of K.H. Dewantara,
Honigmann in Koentjaraningrat (1990) states that
there are three forms of culture, namely ideas,
activities, and artifacts. Following is a brief
explanation of that trilogy of culture.
Culture as ideas, values and norms.
Culture as patterned activities or actions in the
community, also called the social system. This
social system consists of human activities that
interact with each other and are concrete,
happening around us every day, observable,
photographed and documented.
Culture as artifacts, objects of human works.
This type of culture is also called the physical
culture so that the most concrete, can be objects
that can be touched, seen, and photographed.
Another famous author that tries to construct the
concept of culture is Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934), a
Russian psychologist, as he proposes Cognitive-
Construction theory. Theory of cognitive-
Primary School Pre-Service Teacher’s Perspectives on Cultural Needs in Developing Culture-Based Mathematics’ Learning Materials
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