Secondary teachers in the unified Italy: a group portrait with a zoom

After the unification of Italy in 1861 one of the main problems was the creation of a system of instruction to plan curricula and programs, teacher education, textbooks. Mathematicians were very active in this construction and some of them also had important official roles in the government. In this context important initiatives for the professional development of mathematics teachers were carried out: publication of good mathematics textbooks and books on mathematical culture for teaching, and the foundation of journals and associations. Mathematics teachers occupied a leading position in these actions. In this concern a question arises: \u201cWho were the teachers animating these important initiatives?\u201d In this paper I present some elements that help to answer this question by outlining some general characteristics of the mathematics teacher profession of those times and by illustrating the way the profession was lived by the founder of an important journal for mathematics teachers

Mathematics education in the ICMI perspective

Abstract In this article I single out some events and chief characters of the first hundred years of ICMI that fostered the emergence of mathematics education as an academic discipline. This new discipline did not spring out of the blue: Its roots are in the environment of the ICMI (International Commission on Mathematical Instruction) and of the community of mathematicians. The Commission acted as a catalyst of factors that fostered this new discipline. In particular, the perspective of internationalization, communication and solidarity espoused by the ICMI in its early days was transmitted to the important initiatives of the late 1960s: the journal Educational Studies in Mathematics and the tradition of a quadrennial International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME)