Mobilizing histories in mathematics teacher education: memories, social practices, and discursive games

Abstract

In the first part of this paper, we share and elucidate the way we mobilize histories in some disciplines that are part of the undergraduate courses in mathematics teacher education offered by State University of Campinas and Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. This way of mobilization can be featured as a set of collective indisciplinary problematizations occurring in a series of student investigations. Mobilizing practices of mathematics culture are the object of these investigations. These practices are performed by different communities both constituted by and constituent of different human activities. In the second part of this paper, we will discuss our way of mobilizing histories, contrasting it with the theoretical perspective of expansive learning, just as it has been defended by Yrjö Engeström, in his article Non scolae sed vitae discimus—towards overcoming the encapsulation of school learning. We will also attempt to highlight the role which this researcher has attributed to history in his model of expansive learning, a perspective based on the current research on activity theory.