Abstract
The diversity of vulnerability conditions, that have prevented children and adolescents from exercising their right to school education, also produces a diversity of cultural references of the public that comes to Basic Education programs for Youth and Adults in developing countries. This diversity often forges appropriation processes of numeracy practices that defy the rationality assumed by hegemonic mathematics and confront us with the insufficiency of not only the syntactic approach, but also the semantic resources in school mathematics teaching. Focusing on events occurring in classrooms of different programs that I have been accompanying in Brazil, I identify and analyze tensions, disputes, and complementarities among the signification efforts being referenced in syntactic, semantic or pragmatic dimensions of language games that constitute the discursive interactions in these contexts. My analysis is based on theoretical tools of language studies that invest in reflections on pragmatics and, as in Wittgenstein’s later works, assume that meaning is determined by use, allowing scholars to approach linguistic signification as a social phenomenon and numeracy practices as discursive practices of social subjects in interaction. The findings provide evidence to further discuss the complexity of the classroom, to which the vulnerability of the students’ living conditions adds decisive elements, challenges and possibilities.
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Notes
In this paper, the excerpts from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations are quoted as they are in the works of their scholars: referred to only by the initials P.I. §, followed by their paragraph number, when it is from the first part of the work.
I am currently analyzing events in which students are called upon to deal with negative numbers to discuss the relations between syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects involved in the need to expand numeric fields.
It should be noted that the prominence I give to the pragmatic character of the notion of use is not only unidentified with, but can also often be contrasted with, a didactic perspective of “mathematics usefulness”.
The narratives presented here have received some adaptations to favor the understanding of the interaction situation, since, in the original research reports, the events were presented with another argumentative intention.
The notion of grammar proposed in Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein, 1986) comprises the dynamic and continuously flowing set of rules which establishes what is a correct or an incorrect use of language.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq–Brazil) and Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG–Brazil).
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Fonseca, M. Numeracy in Youth and Adult Basic Education: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic dimensions of a discursive practice. ZDM Mathematics Education 52, 395–406 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-019-01110-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11858-019-01110-3