Labor as a structuring unit of mathematics education for rural students

Abstract

In this paper, we present the results of a research carried out with an undergraduate student during her teaching internship. The objective of the research was to investigate the relationship between labor and mathematics teaching in a rural school in the southeastern region of the state of Pará, in the northern region of Brazil. The methodology used was ethnographically inspired and the data were recorded in the researcher's field notebook. Students' productions and observations made in the classroom are also material for analysis. Throughout the text, we present the context in which the research was carried out, briefly listing the main characteristics of the undergraduate course in which the researcher is enrolled, as well as the geographic context of the community where the school in which the research was carried out is located. We present our understanding of two central notions to our analysis: knowledge and labor. The first is taken from a theoretical framework produced within Brazilian Mathematics Education, known as the Model of Semantic Fields, and the second is assumed in line with a Marxist theoretical framework. After the theoretical framework, we present the research methodology, highlighting in general the activities that were carried out in the teaching internship, which was configured as the locus of production of research data. In the analyses, we present the understandings developed by the researcher from the articulation of the theoretical framework with the activities developed during the internship. We put in evidence that the understanding of work presented by the students of the investigated school takes into account only the financial aspect of some activities carried out by them in their daily lives. This understanding is placed in contrast with the definition of labor presented by the adopted theoretical references. Finally, we make some considerations about the use of categories taken from everyday life in the Mathematics teaching and learning processes. We point out that this theoretical perspective opens up the possibility of a didactic action that highlights the non-centrality of Mathematics in the knowledge production processes, as well as enabling the use of other categories in the knowledge production process in a non-hierarchical way in relation to western science.