Numeracy Practices in the Lived Spaces by Middle School Students: Adriano’s Map

Abstract

This article results from a study aimed to understand the mobilization of numeracy practices in the narratives of fifteen middle school students about their lived spaces in the Santa Helena neighborhood, in the city of Governador Valadares, Minas Gerais, Brazil. It assumes the theoretical contributions of studies on numeracy practices, recognizing that they are inserted in the fabric of literacy practices, dialoguing with Henri Lefebvre on the production of space and his analytical triad – conceived, lived, and perceived space. The empirical material was produced during a workshop in which students drew the way they take from home to school on a map, using the resources provided by the online platform Google My Maps. During the workshop, we identified the event ‘Adriano's map’. We selected it for analysis and discussion. Mediated by the computer screen, the student appropriates the technological language, typical of the My Maps platform, welcoming and tensioning the space conceived by the platform creators with the spaces lived/perceived by him in the neighborhood. Thus, the student produces his own meanings for producing and reading maps on a computer screen, becoming the protagonist of the practices he lived and narrated. My maps platform stands out as a powerful tool to produce cartography in studies that operate with the concepts of territory and numeracy practices and for the field of Mathematics Education in general.

Keywords
Middle School; My Maps ; Lived Spaces; Numeracy Practices; Lived/Perceived/Conceived Space