Mathematical knowledge of women embroiderers from Valle del Mezquital: An encounter with their activity

Abstract From a perspective critic to culturo-centric views, we account for local expressions of the mathematical knowledge of women embroiderers from Valle del Mezquital (Mexico). Seeking to incorporate their perspective and rationale, we resort to socio-cultural and ethnographic theoretical and methodological tools to identify and analyze the embroiderers’ actions regarding their cultural practices. Our results show that the embroiderers produce their motifs through counting techniques focused on local transformations and do not draw on the isometries that are usually employed to describe these motifs. Moreover, we show that the classification of motifs and the decisions about what is possible to embroider do not correspond to formal geometrical considerations but to aesthetic and material criteria that are culturally and historically shaped. We conceptualize interviews with the embroiderers as encounters in which a co-constructed discourse emerges and discuss these encounters as a methodological possibility to conduct studies sensitive to the local knowledge that could be valuable for educational research in culturally diverse contexts.