School culture and its relationship to mathematical knowledge: the senses of teaching revealed in the notebooks of a primary teacher

Abstract

In this article, aspects of the educational, cultural and social memory of the Brazilian Northeastern hinterland are analyzed, using the notebooks of primary teachers as a research source to understand the teaching of mathematics developed in the early years of elementary school in the period between 1950 and 1990. School notebooks make it possible to produce knowledge because it contains stories, socioeconomic, political, cultural and educational contexts created in different time periods. The aim of this study is to identify the content covered in the school and aspects related to elementary knowledge of mathematics. School notebooks allow us to produce knowledge because they contain historical, socioeconomic, political, cultural and educational contexts which were gestated in different time periods. The goal is to identify the contents covered and aspects related to elementary knowledge of mathematics. As theoretical references were adopted the understanding of Viñao Frago (2008) about school culture and the concept of Bernard Charlot (2000; 1996) about relationship with knowledge that brings the notion of relationship understood as a set of meanings and space for the subject's activities, inscribed at a certain time. Adopting Cultural History as a theoretical-methodological framework based on the propositions of Roger Chartier (1990) and considering research in the context of the history of school subjects, undertaken by André Chervel (1990), the text still considers Carlo Ginzburg's evidential paradigm (1989), in the search for representing the past and the present of mathematical education in teacher education.