Mathematics Education in Brazilian Rural Areas: An analysis of the Escola Ativa public policy and the Landless Movement Pedagogy

Abstract The article discusses mathematics education within two educational projects addressed to rural multigrade schools in Brazil: Active School Program (in Portuguese, Programa Escola Ativa—PEA) and the Landless Movement (Movimento Sem Terra—MST) Pedagogy. It is based on an ethnomathematics perspective drawn from Wittgenstein's later work and Michel Foucault's thinking. Data comprised PEA teachers’ and students’ documents, MST guideline documents and reports about mathematics education projects developed in MST schools. Its analytical strategy considers the new configurations of what was formerly called rural and urban spaces, in countries like Brazil. Based on this, the article examines the relationship between peasants’ knowledge and school mathematics in those two projects. We show that taking peasant language games into account was important for both. However, for PEA, this was the point of departure while these were taught at schools as part of their struggles for MST. Thus, we argued that the two different educational projects for multigrade peasant schools in rural Brazil (connected to different projects of society) were in dispute: the first was aligned with neoliberal hegemonic logic while the second was attuned to the struggles of MST in opposition with World Bank guidelines.