Experiências de si: formas de fazer cotidiano em sala de aula

Abstract

The following text presents a research on experiences of the self of twenty-one ninth grade students from Middle School in the periphery of Pelotas-RS. This study is theoretically supported by Michel de Certeau’s ideas about quotidian and about the concept of ethnomathematics studied by the Interinstitutional Research Group in Mathematics Education (GIPEMS/UNISINOS), seeking to comprehend how to articulate quotidian and school mathematics in the curriculum of Middle School final years. This way, pedagogical activities were conducted in order to build an educational experience prioritizing the students’ culture. We used the word experience in the sense adopted by Jorge Larossa, discussing it in three dimensions: optical, discursive and juridical. The experiences of the self of the students were analyzed through language games of the subjects, highlighting the subjectivity and power relations in the neighborhood and inside the mathematics classroom. For this, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s mature-phase work was essential. The experiences of the self show that the students seek to understand the power relations in which they are involved, they create knowledge to survive the dominant order in the neighborhood and are alert to opportunities to gain advantages in the space where they live and in the mathematics classroom. The experiences also point to the constitution of subjectivity through a hierarchical perception of school knowledge compared to other types of knowledge.