Trends of the history of mathematics education in Brazil

Abstract

The text aims at characterizing and analyzing the production of the history of mathematics education in Brazil. The study takes the presentations from the last National Seminar of History of Mathematics as a starting point. Such event gathered researchers, in a more significant and comprising way, interested in historical studies of mathematics and its teaching. The characterization points at the existence of four different tendencies: a production that considers the studies about history of mathematics education as part of the research about history of mathematics; a trend of opinions that takes into account the pedagogical use of history in mathematics education and establishes conditions for the research in the history of mathematics education; studies that use oral history for mathematics teachers’ training courses; and, finally, another trend that treats the history of mathematics education as history, that means, a specificity of historical production, having the mathematics education as an object. It will be shown that the characterization of those trends reveals different ways of representing the past of mathematics education, as well as the relationships Brazilian researches keep with international studies about this subject.