Expectativa versus Realidade: “Não Era a Matemática que Eu Esperava”

Abstract

In this paper, we present an excerpt from the first author's PhD research, which was completed in February 2022, in the Postgraduate Program in Mathematics Education at the Federal University of Mato Grosso do Sul (UFMS), under the supervision of the second author. The aim of the research was to describe how students from Integrated Secondary Education (EMI) and Higher Education at a campus of the Federal Institute of Goiás were constituted as subjects-students excluded by the mathematics curriculum. The material used for the analysis consisted of textualizations of narrative interviews with EMI students, who had retaken the mathematics course because they had failed previously, and with students who had dropped out of the mathematics degree course. We used discourse analysis, inspired by the theories of philosopher Michel Foucault, to highlight statements about what the students said, with the aim of achieving our objectives. The statement we will present in this section is: 'it wasn't the math I expected'. In it, the students blame Eurocentric mathematics for their process of exclusion. We will see that this statement, which places the mathematics of the global north as the only true and accepted one, is crossed by other discursive fields, such as the scientific and the pedagogical/educational, showing how mathematics curricula are territories that produce clashes over hegemonic meanings, which we need to problematize and resist.