A METHODOLOGICAL PROPOSAL FOR TEXTBOOK ANALYSIS

Abstract

Research on textbooks has been carried out in different countries and with different purposes, including a set of studies that seek to know what those books convey in their texts. This type of investigation gives a view of the textbook as something that gives materiality to the proposed curriculum as a way to approach the knowledge taught and/or to identify elements that contribute to understanding reasons for some learning difficulties and persistent errors. Since the early 2000s, I have guided research studies that seeks to understand what kind of mathematics is proposed in textbooks intended for Brazilian basic education and how it is proposed. After a few years of this work, I outlined a model for textbook analysis based on elements of the anthropological theory of the didactic. This model consists of the following, not necessarily linear, steps: constituting the corpus for the analysis, the modellation of mathematical praxeologies present in the Course part of the material, doing the mathematical analysis of the Activities Proposed, the modellation of Didactic Praxeologies, and Triangulating data. This text presents this model, illustrating it with research studies I supervised, showing the relevance of the model of analysis developed.