Obstacles and Resistances in the Use of Methodological Trends in Mathematics Education

Abstract

This article is the result of a research that aimed to investigate, describe, and analyze obstacles and resistances pointed out by teachers who teach Mathematics in Basic Education when using some methodological tendency different from the traditional method. The research corpus of analysis evidence was composed of articles extracted from specialized periodicals in ​​Mathematics Education and from related areas. In all, articles published in forty-nine journals from 1996 to 2016 were analyzed. With this cut, from the research community perspective, it was possible to identify sixteen articles that brought evidence of obstacles and resistance faced by teachers who teach Mathematics. By analyzing what such research report, we sought a description of phenomena of different natures that culminate in obstacles and, consequently, in resistance. To this end, the observed data were organized into five categories: the teacher and their relationship with work; the teacher and their relationship with the school; the teacher and their relationship with the curriculum; the teacher and their relationship with knowledge; students, and their relationship to methodological trends. The analysis work made it possible to infer some clues to understand the existence of obstacles and resistances and, as a result, structures were pointed out that comprise the emotional (feelings), knowledge (knowledge) and circumstances (conditions) to which the teachers are submitted. Finally, the work aimed to provoke reflections on the reasons that lead some teachers not to change old practices that tend to reproduce the training model centered on the transmission of content.

Methodological Trends; Obstacles and Resistances; Teacher’s conceptions; Mathematical education