Facilitating Source-Centered History of Mathematics

We present and discuss initiatives to develop source-centered teaching materials in history of mathematics for upper secondary education, aiming at meeting the objective of the Danish curriculum to make history of mathematics relevant. To this end we present the design template for such multi-purpose materials we developed, which allows devising materials neither too superficial nor too specialized, and we address the constraints on and affordances of historical sources in adapting to teaching objectives. It includes differentiation and scalability for using historical sources, and provides opportunity for interdisciplinary teaching, another requirement for Danish upper secondary education. We also report on (i) the recent application of our design approach to develop such source-centered materials in collaboration with small groups of dedicated teachers, and (ii) students’ positive response to the inquiry-driven teaching based on this material.