Mathematics Education and the decolonial perspective: participants, knowledge, and ways of thinking in Brazilian research

Abstract

This article presents the results of post-Doctoral research whose objective was to develop an analytical overview of research produced in Brazil on the debate on decoloniality in the field of Mathematics Education. It is a bibliographic study produced from a survey of research in the Catálogo de Teses e Dissertações da Capes and the Biblioteca Digital Brasileira de Teses e Dissertações.13 dissertations and 7 theses were selected. We used Discursive Textual Analysis to analyze the abstracts, which made it possible to group the research based on its participants into four categories: gender relations, ethnic-racial relations, indigenous people, and teacher training. Furthermore, the knowledge correlated in the research was grouped into indigenous knowledge, racial issues, knowledge of school/academic Mathematics. Finally, we discuss ways of thinking about Mathematics Education, through two categories: “Decolonizing teaching” and “Decolonizing the hegemony of Western mathematics”