History of Mathematics, Mathematics Education, School Practice: Case Studies in Linking Different Domains

In this paper we consider how the domains of mathematics education and history of mathematics may interact in the process of mathematics teaching. We try to tackle the problem by focussing on the teachers' role, which is central in this process (see Figure 1): on the one hand they act as filters of the stimuli and the suggestions coming from curriculum developers and historians of mathematics, on the other hand they are a basic source of outputs from classrooms which allow us to evaluate the experiments carried out. In the diagram of Figure 1 a dotted line represents the problematic relationship between the domains of research in mathematics education and in the history of mathematics, which will be the main concern of the present paper.