Do texto ao contexto do livro didático de Matemática no Ensino Médio: apropriações para a Educação Financeira

Abstract

Thinking Financial Education as a contribution to critical and emancipatory citizenship means positioning it as a path to question and transgress the power relations that sustain the systems of oppression reified in neoliberal society. From this perspective, this dissertation aims to understand the possibilities of appropriating high school mathematics textbook for critical and emancipatory citizenship through Financial Education. The study begins with the observation that reforms, such as the High School Reform (Law 13.415/2017), the restructuring of the Programa Nacional do Livro e do Material Didático (PNLD) and the approval of the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC), have contributed to the dissemination of neoliberal ideology, transforming education into a commodity and subjects into passive consumers and flexible workers subject to the demands of capital. These reforms uncritically incorporate the assumptions of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), reinforcing a hegemonic and instrumental view of Financial Education. Given this overview, this qualitative interdisciplinary research begins by criticizing the offensives that place education as a mechanism for reproducing social inequalities. To this end, it draws on the theoretical contributions of textbook scholars, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy, Critical Mathematics Education and authors who comprehend Financial Education as a way to human emancipation and the formation of critical citizenship. Initially, a bibliographic survey was conducted, followed by a literature review covering the aforementioned theoretical fields. The fieldwork took place at a state public school in Erechim, Rio Grande do Sul, with mathematics teachers and second-year high school students. The empirical material consisted of a documentary analysis of the textbook Matemática em contextos: Estatística e Matemática financeira (Editora Ática, PNLD 2021), which was being used by the research subjects; a questionnaire with open-ended questions was administered to the participating teachers; and a workshop in which, perceiving the classroom as a landscape of investigation, the participating students and their Math teacher were invited to question and investigate financial situations presented in the aforementioned textbook, thus emerging generative themes of new problematizations. Data analysis was organized into three categories: the approach to financial situations presented in the textbook; the teaching praxis developed based on the textbook’s content; and classroom interactions through the exploration of the propositions conveyed in the textbook. The results indicate that the approach to Financial Education as presented in the textbook under analysis represents an insufficient opportunity for the critical and citizenship development of the subjects; teaching praxis poses a challenge, both for critical appropriation of the textbook and for an inquiring look at issues related to Financial Education; and the classroom space, when guided by a problematizing perspective, can favor the appropriation of such material for critical, citizenship and emancipatory Financial Education.