Relações saber-poder: discursos, tensões e estratégias que (re)orientam a constituição do livro didático de matemática

Abstract

The present research has the aim to analyze and describe the way in which the Mathematics textbook is situated within an arid and constantly controversial field, where power relations that cross the field of didactic production produce normatizations and establish practices that constitute it. Inspired by the studies of Michel Foucault – more specifically in the relations of knowledge, power of discourse and governmentality – as well as in the perspective of cartographic research proposed by Kastrup, we mobilized interviews with recognized authors in the field of didactic production of Mathematics and with editors, designers, freelancers,former members of the National Textbook Program and public school teachers as main resource for data production. Beginning with data construction and analysis, we organized the text in four initial chapters, where the discussion has happened over topics that present a general understanding on the field, as well as the mobilized theoretical-methodological foundations. Five articles complement the texts that can be read independently, which articulations allow an understanding of the research as a whole. These articles focus on: the Mathematics book didactic idealization starting with the discourses that make up the field of its production (article 1); the standardization, the surveillance, the examination and classification processes present in the panoptic environment of the Mathematics didactic production (article 2); the relations of power that act in the network production, promoting the appearance and disappearance of the author, as well as the emergence of ghost writers(article 3); the multiple directions in the flow of power and the adjustments that it elicits through the counter conduct (article 4); and how the National Textbook Program (PNLD) is affected by power relations, acting as an instrument of neoliberal governmentality (article 5). This course leads to an understanding of the Mathematics textbook production process as a space through which a shape-shifting power circulates, adapting itself to survive. Under Foucauldianlens, we can identify elements of a disciplinary power in different sectors of this production, a panoptic environment where books and subjects, after been examined, compared, weighted,measured, are valued within purely economic parameters. As effects from these relations,useful, docilized, normalized subjects are produced, transforming each and every one, vigilant and watched. On the edge, self-vigilant. In this context, the results of focus group research, the reading of teachers' statements, statistics and reports produced from PNLD's pedagogical evaluations, among other mechanisms, highlight the intrinsic knowledge-power relationship,as the knowledge produced in the network that move the current power in flow. By putting the author´s figure in check as a "creative genius" and an "intellectual architect of the work",highlighting the emergence of ghost writers in his disappearance, we deprive the book of its"sacred image", placing it in the game of strategies and negotiations, in which it, the book,plays the role of a profitable economic product. In this context, we highlight the role of the PNLD as a useful tool for a neoliberal governmentality that contributes to the institution of a performativity culture, transforming disciplined workers into self-entrepreneurs. Therefore, it becomes evident in the following chapters and articles the way which Mathematics textbook presents itself as a product and power in a power machinery that feeds itself back, producing,in the midst of the relations that derive from it, knowledge and useful subjects for the maintenance and the perpetuation of a production "model" , in which the great editorial groups maintain their hegemony from these same power relations, always flexible, multi directionaland (re) adaptable.