Um olhar para o elo entre Educação Matemática e cidadania: a Matemática Financeira sob a perspectiva da Etnomatemática

Abstract

This study presents a strong connection between mathematics education and citizenship, focusing on teaching commercial or financial mathematics based on the perspectives of ethnomathematics. We start presenting a few considerations about the concepts: education, citizenship, financial mathematics and, ethnomathematics. Continuing, we investigate how the official documents write about education: the Law of Directives and Bases (LDB), the National Curricular Directives (DCN) and, the National Curricula Parameters (PCN) always looking for financial mathematics and citizenship. We found out that these documents propose that education should provide the students with the ability of exercising their rights as citizens and somehow it include financial mathematics. Investigating text books we found that the recommendations from the official documents are not being followed because these books do not approach citizenship or financial mathematics. In order to gain information about the work in classrooms we did interviews with teachers. All of them agree that it is important to teach, at the basic level of education, financial mathematics and link it to citizenship and, they pointed that some experiments were done but very isolated and usually are not diffused among teachers. We present a teaching experiment that took place with six and seven grade students and, end up with a proposal for us teachers that is based on ethnomathematics to teach financial mathematics as a linkage to citizenship.