“Their lives are mathematics”: truth regimes on mathematical education of adults in rural areas

Abstract

This paper presents some results of a research project whose main goal was to analyze regimes of truth about adult peasant’s mathematics education. Its theoretical support was a post-structuralist perspective – based on Michel Foucault’s thought – and the field of Ethnomathematics. The research data analyzed in the paper is composed by a set of narratives about mathematics education produced by peasant educators living in the south of Brazil. These narratives were obtained through interviews done by students of a Teacher Education Course belonging to the social movement “Articulação por uma educação do campo”. The data analysis showed that the educators identify practices of measuring, counting, localizing, etc. as part of their culture, addressing its meaning to the school mathematics in which they were socialized. Its analysis also suggested that there is a sort of suppression of those marks that institute the peasant’s ethnomathematics, leading to the idea that the interviewees were captured by the “power of the Western rationality” (Walkerdine, 1995).

Key words: peasant education, ethnomathematics, curriculum.