Arithmetic Problems: participation in the teaching march and in the relation with students’ practical lives (French students’ notebooks – 1890 to 1936)

Abstract

This article discusses how proposals for the use of problems in arithmetic teaching were present in primary school classrooms. The corpus consists of 72 French notebooks from the period between 1870 and 1936. Besides the notebooks’ exploration, the discussions approached the relations with prescriptions and guidelines for mathematics teaching in French primary school in that historical period. The theoretical framework for the analysis involved Certeau's consumption concept, Gvirtz and Larrondo's perspective of the notebook as both a product and a producer of school culture, and the importance of considering the existence of specific rules for the use of notebooks, as mentioned by Viñao. The results show that, over time the themes used in problems little by little stopped approaching aspects of life in the countryside, and the teaching march, which initially involved only one type of problem (proportionality), started to approach the centrality of a specific content - also related to type-problems - and to propose a sequence of contents in the period between 1915 and 1936. In addition, we take into consideration the fact that, in that historical period, problems were present in notebooks as some knowledge to be taught.

Keywords:
Problems; Mathematics Teaching; Primary School; School Notebooks