Abstract
Mathematics teachers feel the necessity for concrete teaching materials, which reflect the needs of their students in terms of different linguistic and cultural backgrounds (Favilli, 2015). A number of studies (e.g.
Hastedt, 2016; Secada, 1992) show that these students encounter even more difficulties than their native classmates in acquiring fundamental mathematical skills. It is recommended that appropriate teaching materials for multicultural classrooms should follow certain inclusive criteria (Favilli, 2013; Novotná, Ulovec & Moraová, 2020): Fostering tolerance, inducing interest, value diversity, emphasize cooperative learning, make use of different cultural backgrounds, use a variety of contexts and names from multiple cultures, avoid cultural stereotypes etc.
To take into consideration the different learning levels and learning styles of students, it is also recommended that such materials make use of ICT (Bartolini Bussi et al., 2004; Ebenhofer & Knierzinger, 2007). The paper shows how the recommendation to respect inclusive criteria, the recommendation to use ICT, and the recommendation to have concrete suggestions for classroom use, can be fulfilled, by giving two examples demonstrating the use of ICT in teaching mathematics to multicultural students.
In the first one, we show how a classical multicultural teaching unit can be enhanced by using ICT. The second example demonstrates how an ICT product - a learning software that has been designed specifically for migrant students - can be used to produce a concrete teaching unit for multicultural classrooms.
These examples show how the use of ICT - appropriately applied and eventually combined with already existing materials - can support mathematics teachers in their needs for teaching materials suitable for multicultural classrooms.
