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About ICMI AMOR

The project

This project was initiated by Jean-Luc Dorier within the Executive Committee of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI).

This project aims at building online resources reflecting highly significant and influential research in mathematics education at an international level, that could serve as a reference not only for researchers in the field, but also for educators, teachers, curriculum developers and policy makers and other agents in the field. In particular, the project could serve as a basis for a PhD training program and induction into mathematics education research.

ICMI awards

ICMI was formed more than a century ago (see https://www.mathunion.org/icmi/organization/historical-sketch-icmi) and international events like the International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME) have been held since 1969. Mathematics education research does not have an equally long history and is a rather young field of research, with its roots often embedded in local contexts. However, one can say that the field is now at a turn of its history when, there is a need for a set of references with theories, methodologies, results and fields of investigation that the community can claim as the most important trends.

Of course, this is a begs the question as to how to select which are the most important trends to be represented, at least initially. Since 2003 ICMI has honored outstanding individuals every second year with two awards:

  • The Felix Klein Award, named after the first president of ICMI (1908-1920), honours a lifetime achievement.
  • The Hans Freudenthal Award, named after the eighth president of ICMI (1967-1970), recognizes a major cumulative program of research.

In order to build our resources ICMI has decided to focus on each Klein and Freudenthal ICMI Awardee, through what we have called the AMOR (Awardees Multimedia Online Resources) project. The more recent Emma Castelnuovo award, named after the Italian mathematics educator born in 1913, in celebration of her 100th birthday and in honor of her pioneering work, has been established to recognize outstanding achievements in the practice of mathematics education. It is now in the process of being integrated into the AMOR project.

ICMI Awardees

Here is a table of all the awardees to date (following this link https://www.mathunion.org/icmi/awards/recipients-icmi-awards  you can access the citation of all awardees).

 

  Felix Klein Award Hans Freundenthal Award
2003 Guy BROUSSEAU Celia HOYLES
2005 Ubiratan D'AMBROSIO Paul COBB
2007 Jeremy KILPATRICK Anna SFARD
2009 Gilah LEDER Yves CHEVALLARD
2011 Alan SCHOENFELD Luis RADFORD
2013 Michèle ARTIGUE Frederick LEUNG
2015 Alan BISHOP Jill ADLER
2017 Deborah BALL Terezinha NUNES
2019 Tommy DREYFUS Gert SCHUBRING

ICMI AMOR

ICMI AMOR project is a long-term project that is built for the prosperity and history of Mathematics Education research. In 2017, and for practical reasons, Jean-Luc Dorier started with the three French awardees. He contacted: Annie Bessot and Claire Margolinas for Guy Brousseau, Marianna Bosch for Yves Chevallard and Michèle Artigue herself. The five of them have since worked regularly in order to give shape to the project. They made different choices and decided on the frame of the project. They received some technical support from the University of Geneva, from Isabelle Descombes for the graphical design, Alexandre Bourquin for the filming and editing and Sandra De Grazia for the web design. Recently, Abraham Arcavi joined the project and has begun work on the Anna Sfard Unit with Anna herself.

Each unit is devoted to one awardee and consists of a series of 8 to 12 modules between 10 and 30 minutes up to a total of 120-180 mins of videos. One module is basically a slide presentation with a speaker visible in the right below corner (sometimes full screen). The same graphic design (made by Isabelle Descombes) and music jingle (composed especially by Gabriel Bosch, Marianna’s son) is used to give a unity to the project. The speaker can be, but is not necessarily, the awardee him/herself. There can also be variation from one module to the other or even within the same module. A range additional multimedia, including films, animations can be used. No doubt new media formats will emerge over time.

The idea is that each module gives some keys to help reading some research papers which are given as free access resources attached to each module. There is also a global selected bibliography of the awardee’s work and of connected researchers.

An introductory module (Module 0) on each awardee presents some biographical and scientific elements of the background of the awardee. All the videos are in English, like most of the text. Some texts in other languages will sometimes be available.

We will try build the many modules as fast as possible but as can be imagined, the development of a unit takes time and not all awardees will have their resources online immediately.