Mathematics that feels on the skin: the Mathematical Thinking of deafblind students

Abstract

This article, with a descriptive qualitative approach, with the characteristics of a multiple case study, aims to present and discuss the results of a doctoral research that aimed to investigate and discuss characteristics of the Mathematical Thinking of deafblind students at a school in the city of LondrinaPR. For that, the Semantic Fields Model (SCM), proposed by Rômulo Campos Lins, was assumed as an epistemological and methodological perspective. As theoretical support, a characterization was adopted for the mode of production of meanings for Mathematics expected from students in the educational context of Paraná, developed from the production of meanings of the first author of this work for the residues of enunciations contained in the Curricular Guidelines for Education of Paraná for the discipline of Mathematics. Having these references, we carried out a reading of the residues of utterances of two students, produced during semi-structured interviews that aimed to characterize the school contexts in which they were and/or are inserted and a characterization for the modes of production of meanings for Mathematics, or even, for the Mathematical Thought of each one of them. The study showed that the most present and valued way in all students' school learning, from concrete to abstract notions, after the emergence of deafblindness, was inseparable from the manipulation, present or past, of physical objects. Only one of the students demonstrated the expected Mathematical Thought in the context in which they are inserted, and that both demonstrate, in their ways of dealing with Mathematics, objectifying mathematical notions and referring to “concrete”, “everyday”objects.