Curriculum, Culture and Ethnomathematics: The practices of 'cubagem of wood' in the Brazilian Landless Movement

Abstract

This paper looks at the eld of Mathematics Education and its relationship with cultural, social and political issues. It approaches this theme within the landscape of the struggle for land carried out by the Brazilian Landless Movement (Movimento Sem Terra-MST), and the role that has been played by Education in this social movement. The rst section of the paper presents a succinct view of this landscape. The second section discusses Ethnomathematics, focusing on some of the issues that are currently being studied in this eld of Mathematics Education. The third section shows and discusses an excerpt of an empirical study based on an ethnomathematics approach, performed with a group of students of an MST Teacher Education Training Course. The study had as its main theme the practices of 'cubagem of wood'. Here the previously analyzed ideas interact with the data collected during the eldwork. The paper ends by presenting some nal thoughts. The Landscape: Brazil and the struggle for landBrazil is one of the countries with the greatest land ownership concentration in the world. This situation originated during the Portuguese colonization, at the beginning of the sixteenth century and has grown in the last few decades. Recent of cial data clearly indicate the trend towards a highly concentrated land ownership: of all the rural properties in the country, 49% are less than 10 hectares, and take up 2.2% of the Brazilian territory, while properties with over 1000 hectares, representing 1% of the total number of properties, occupy 45% of the area of the country. The land ownership concentration intensi ed from the 1970s onwards, corresponding to the advance of capitalism in the countryside, leading to a number of changes in the rural environment. A rapid accumulation of capital occurred, consequently producing a greater concentration of land, centralized control of the different sectors of the economy and the introduction of agroindustry and a modern agriculture mainly for export purposes. This model had serious social consequences,

Indigenous artifacts from remote areas, used to design a lesson plan for preservice math teachers regarding sustainable education

“…The concept of involving indigenous knowledge in math learning for both trained and preservice teachers needs to be included in ethnomathematically-based education courses ( Dawson, 2013 ; Iluno and Taylor, 2013 ; Verner et al., 2013 ). Training also needs to be conducted through an ethnomathematics study, that involves indigenous people, because such an examination would reveal the cultural, social, and political dimensions of math education ( Knijnik, 2002 ).…”

Social Movements and Educational Research: Toward a United Field of Scholarship

“…Researchers from myriad fields have studied the history of movement schools serving adults, such as the American Labor Colleges of the 1920s and 1930s (Altenbaugh, 1990;Edwards & McCarthy, 1992) and the Highlander School (Edwards & McCarthy, 1992;Horton & Freire, 1990;Thayer-Bacon, 2004), and children, such as the British and American Socialist Sunday Schools of early 20th century (Gerrard, 2012(Gerrard, , 2013Teitelbaum, 1995). More recent examples of movement-sponsored schools featured in educational research include community schools for children living in Brazilian favelas (Jones de Almeida, 2003), Black supplementary schools for youth in the U.K. (Reay & Mirza, 1997), and the schools supporting the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil (which range from primary schools for children through graduate schools offering teacher education; Caldart, 2002;Diniz-Pereira, 2005;Kane, 2000;Knijnik, 1997Knijnik, , 2002. Although movement schools have served multiple and diverse purposes, ranging from the promotion of the movement's ideas, philosophies, and ideals to the achievement of concrete goals (as in the Freedom Schools' role in voter registration) to the direct training of potential activists (as with Labor Colleges), researchers have suggested that running through all is a critique of and response to statesponsored schooling.…”

“…One question, for example, which has been addressed most directly in discussions of social movement schools, is to what extent the political ideals of social movements inform the pedagogical philosophies and practices of its educational initiatives. In studies of many movement schools, including anarchist 'modern' schools (Avrich, 2006), SNCC's freedom schools (Perlstein, 1990(Perlstein, , 2002, Zapatista autonomous schools (Shenker, 2012), and Brazilian Landless Workers' schools (see Diniz-Pereira, 2005;Ghanem, 1998;Kane, 2000;Knijnik, 2002), pedagogical philosophies and practices were found to be extensions of movement goals and ideals. Yet we also see cases in which movement schools have been found to embrace methods more typically associated with state schooling.…”

Adults’ numeracy practices in fluid and unstable contexts—An agenda for education, policy and research?

“…There is now a significant corpus of studies of adults' numeracy practices in their personal, community, educational and workplace environments (Yasukawa et al 2018b). A number of different theoretical lenses have been used to study the social, historical, cultural and political aspects of numeracy practices, including situated cognition (Lave 1988;Nunes et al 1993), Engeström's third generation cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) (FitzSimons 2005;Kanes 2002), (New) Literacy Studies (Street et al 2005), andethnomathematics (D'Ambrosio 1985;Knijnik 2002). Researching numeracy through these lenses has shown how numeracy practices are never separable from the particular social context in which they emerge.…”