文档介绍：MATHEMATICS EDUCATION AND THE BRAZILIAN LANDLESS MOVEMENT: THREE DIFFERENT MATHEMATICS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE STRUGGLE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
Gelsa Knijnik
Gelsak(at)
ABSTRACT
This paper aims to discuss issues related to mathematics education and social justice in our Empire times taking as an empirical base for the discussion the work developed by the author in the last 16 years with the Brazilian Landless Movement. The paper analyzes this peasant social movement, focusing on the political role it is assuming in what Hardt and Negri (2001) called Empire, and more specifically, the educational work it is improving in the country. It also presents the theoretical background that informs the author’s ethnomathematics thinking based on a Post-Modern perspective in its connections with Post-Structuralist theorizations, more specifically, those associated with the work of Michel Foucault. Moreover, using the work of the “Second Wittgenstein”(which corresponds to his book “Philosophical Investigations”) three different mathematics: are shown: a mathematics produced by a form of life associated to MST peasants, another one produced by a form of life of the urban sawmill men and a third, produced by a form of life found in the Western Eurocentric school, even considering that all of them have family resemblances.
Introduction
The well-known Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, in the language of his time, stated, in his book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”, that education had a political dimension. Later, he himself reformulated that first statement he had made, saying that education is political. Freirian thinking, in particular its emphasis on the politicity of education and the central role given to culture in the constitution of educational processes, in its time had a major impact on the peripheral countries and also on the central ones, an impact that, possibly, gradually also reached the area of Mathematics Education.
Decades after Freire’s initial ideas, w