Teacher empowerment and critical mathematics education

Challenges and possibilities of a liberating educational practice

Abstract

The objective of this article is to present the challenges and possibilities of developing - in formative contexts that discuss the teaching of mathematics from the perspective of Critical Mathematics Education - a process of teacher empowerment through a liberating educational practice with teachers from the early years of the Elementary School. For this purpose, an excerpt of a doctoral research with a qualitative approach is presented, with action research characteristics, developed with five teachers from the early years of Elementary School of a state school in São Paulo, who participated in a continuing education that had as theoretical and practical principles Critical Mathematics Education and Liberating Education. For a period of nine months, over fifteen meetings, there was dialogue about themes arising from the knowledge of the teachers' experience and their relationship with the educational context. The idea of dialoguing about these themes allowed not only to become aware of the reality, but also to build actions aimed at transforming pedagogical practice. In this way, the dialogues established between the participants and the researcher also opened the way for the teaching of mathematics to be reflected and discussed in terms of Critical Mathematics Education. The data produced during the continuing education were analyzed and interpreted in the light of the Dialogical Analysis of Discourse, derived from Bakhtinian studies. The results of this investigation showed that the school was subjected to a bureaucratization of the school system that, through power relations, submitted the participating teachers to norms and hierarchies that resulted, in their perception, in limit situations that, in principle, could not be overcome. Based on this observation, it was identified that the main challenge in the development of the empowerment process is to break with the perspective that the situations experienced by the participating teachers cannot be overcome. But, as the situations presented are problematized, in which reality is unveiled and understood as problems, these challenges become possibilities for action and overcoming.