People building themselves as social subjects in the appropriation of numeracy practices

Numeracy study group (GEN) research program

Abstract

In this text, we discuss theoretical-methodological dispositions of the Numeracy Study Group (GEN), seeking to understand how people, in their singularities, but as social subjects, appropriate mathematical practices, considered as discursive practices. GEN's research, teacher training, and work in different educational contexts are inserted in the Mathematics Education and Literacy fields. They seek to know Education subjects (children, teenagers, young people, adults, and elderly people), who forge uses of linguistic systems related to quantification, measurement, ordering, classification, and organization of forms and spaces. We analyze these uses, which we call numeracy practices, considering that the subjects live in ‘graphocentric’ and ‘quanticrate’ societies, and are moved by pragmatic intentions and parameterized by cultural references. The situations in which we identify numeracy practices – the numeracy events – are historical and not simply episodical. They are taken as units of analysis to discuss the intentions of uses, the meaning effects they produce and, mainly, how subjects are built in the interactions mediated by these uses, when producing and tensioning meanings. In the section ‘Understanding mathematical practices as discursive practices: focus, perspective and theoretical-methodological references of the Numeracy Study Group (GEN)’: we explain the purpose of the Group Research Program (to know subjects and social groups that carry out numeracy practices); we justify its theoretical basis (Literacy Studies as Social Practice; Freire's Pedagogy of Freedom and Autonomy; Vygotsky's understanding of cognition as a social process; and the sociological approach to Language); and we assume ethnography as the investigation logic and interaction analysis as the main treatment of empirical material. Given the specificities of the subjects, we point out the need to dialogue with several fields: Youth, Adult and Elderly (Basic) Education (YAE), Sociology of Childhood(s); Studies of Youth(s); Rural Education; Indigenous Education; Deaf Education; Teacher Training, among others. In the section ‘Understanding numeracy practices as literacy practices: analytical and pedagogical fecundity of theoretical choices’, we clarify how our studies are inserted in an Ethnomathematics perspective, because they contribute to knowing the subjects while they carry out mathematical practices by assuming discursive positions – therefore, social, cultural, and political. In the section ‘Understanding mathematical learning as appropriation of numeracy practices: developments in the conception of mathematical practices as discursive practices’, we present the concept of appropriation of numeracy practices, inspired by Vygostsky. It is used to discuss multiple meanings of the subjects' actions in numeracy events, and provides a theoretical tool to understand mathematical learning not as an individual cognitive experience but as a social action. In the section ‘Theoretical interlocutions and analytical dispositions of GEN’s most recent studies’, we indicate our use of a three-dimensional analysis of the discourse (textual, discursive and social practice) to better understand the subjects and recognize them as social subjects. This recognition led us to Paulo Freire's ideas on the subject of culture, subject of knowledge, dialogical subject, and subject of process, which make up the historical subject, protagonist of numeracy events. In the ‘coda’ (‘Reiterating’), we reaffirm the focus of our investigation agenda in the field of Mathematics Education: people building themselves as social subjects, while appropriating numeracy practices.