O pensamento computacional em livros didáticos de matemática do ensino médio: leituras junto à educação matemática crítica

Abstract

The way in which computational thinking has been mobilized in some curriculum documents, guided by the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC), became a worrying educational and academic phenomenon. In this dissertation, we aim to understand, from a Critical Mathematics Education (CME) perspective, how computational thinking is portraid in High School Mathematics and its Technologies textbooks approved in 2021 by the Programa Nacional do Livro e do Material Didático (PNLD). In order to do this, we opted for documentary research, with qualitative treatment of didactic works – student’s books and teacher's manual - the data was also analyzed inspired by the three-dimensional discourse analysis proposed by Norman Fairclough. At the beginning, we analyzed a discursive practice, looking at the neo-technical context in which the books were produced. Next, we analyzed the discourses contained in the works in a descriptive way, based on a previous data arrangement, that described texts and images present, especially in activities, in order to highlight structures, signification processes and imagery elements connected to computational thinking. Finally, we carried out a social practice analysis, based on CME elements and selected discourses, that were previously described and contextualized. These readings led us to understand that those books have discourses, both in activities and in guidelines for teachers, which can conform, challenge and/or transform power relations, ideologies and social structures in math classes. In these discourses, we observed: 1) the predominance of a possible exercise paradigm, in a “new guise” in which computational thinking is presented in mathematical activities, often simply signposted, with the apparent purpose of making the works comply with the public notice that selects them based on the prescriptions established by the BNCC; 2) that, to a lesser extent, some activities and their discourses open up possibilities for investigation scenarios, mobilizing mathematical, technological and reflective knowledge for the development of democratic competence; 3) that access to computational thinking expressed in the books largely fails to take into account Brazilian educational inequalities; and 4) that computational thinking is associated, in book’s narratives, with the job market, reinforcing the neo-technical context in which they are produced.