Aspects of Kyikatêjê culture in a Mathematics teaching experience

Abstract

In this essay, we present an internship experience carried out in a Kyikatêjê indigenous school, in the north of Brazil, and we analyze aspects of this experience based on the concepts of authority and transcultural communicative space. Therefore, we briefly describe the context in which the internship research took place, highlighting the objectives of the internship, the period of implementation and the teachers involved. In this characterization, we locate the point of interest that motivated the writing of the present work. Indicating our object of study, we present two theoretical sections that characterize the perspective with which we work. In the first, we expose the concept of authority, understood from the Model of Semantic Fields. We present how this concept is related to the justification used in the production of knowledge. In doing so, we claim that our interest is directed to the epistemological aspects of the internship experience. In the following session, we present the concept of transcultural communicative space, as those situations of interaction where two or more cultures meet and that the otherness of the space constituted in this encounter, enables the sharing of legitimacy among them. After presenting the theoretical concepts, the internship experience is presented in order to highlight the relationship between the intern, the teachers and the students and not the mathematical contentes of the classes. In the last section, this internship experience is analyzed in the light of the presented concepts. We point out in the conclusion that the students' behavior comes from legitimacies constituted in the culture of which they are part, but this behavior does not necessarily indicate an openness to the learning process. We also point out that the creation of a communicative space that mobilizes the legitimacy of the Kyikatêjê culture in the mathematics class, favoring the ways of producing knowledge of this culture, provided a change in the students' knowledge production process.