The limits of meaning in the teaching of mathematics

Abstract

In The Limits of Meaning (Os Limites do Sentido, 1995), Eduardo Guimarães analyzes the efforts to rescue the issue of meaning in linguistic studies as a movement to include in their object elements that Saussure had deliberately excluded: the subject, the world and the history. In the paper The possibilities for innovation in the teaching-learning of elementary mathematics (As possibilidades de inovação no ensino-aprendizagem da matemática elementar, 1995), Manuela David collects what she considered to be the most expressive trends in the current teaching of mathematics in Brazil, remarking that all of them, seeking for a meaning, go beyond the mathematical contents. In the present work we paraphrase Guimarães text, and take such current trends in the teaching of mathematics (problem solving, modeling, constructivism, ethnomathematics, and what David refers as a teaching committed to social change) trying to identify in them the search for a meaning for the teaching of mathematics. This is done through the re-inclusion of those same elements that were excluded from Linguistics by Sausurre, and neglected by more traditional approaches to school mathematics. What the analysis tries to point out is how the search for meaning in the teaching of mathematics takes a path analogous to that identified by Guimarães in studies of language: the effort to re-include in the approach to school mathematics those elements traditionally excluded: the object, the subject and the history.