Possibilidades pedagógicas do uso da imagem fotográfica no âmbito do livro didático de matemática

Abstract

Humanity is undergoing a period of intense changes, in all aspects, having the abundant use of images as a way to register, express and promote the events that characterize contemporaneity, marked by the impacting presence of this phenomenon. However, the image has always been a part of the evolution of man as an instrument for communication. In the current context it is used with many objectives in different study areas, reaching the field of generation and diffusion of knowledge. In a still tardy way, the schools begin to incorporate this panorama. In this study, we question the linguistic paradigm as a primordial form of text in the task of human communicability, when we defend its expansion to the perspective of visual culture. We appropriate ourselves of the photographic image, as a sign of social constitution, of which the main role is to represent reality, through the media principal. We analyzed the functions of photography in didactic math books, referring to the final years of middle school, from the affirmation that the photographic image can have illustrative, communicative, decorative and epistemic functions in this serving channel of mathematical knowledge. The illustrative serve as a way to call attention to a content that is being approached; the decorative has the role of garnishing, adorning the book; the communicative is characterized by the capacity to inform a mathematical situation and the epistemic occurs when the photographic image has de mediating potential in the development of contents in the teaching of math, specifically in relation to the content of symmetry. We considered the mathematical contextualization, within the linking of the research fields of Visual Culture and Mathematical visualization, in the process of teaching Math. We anchored ourselves to researchers such as Santaella, Peirce and Carlos, in the discussion about image; Flores, in the articulation between Visual Culture and Mathematical visualization; Maioli, in the treatment of the question of mathematical contextualization and Rêgo et al, in relation to the study of symmetry, among others. Our investigation is characterized as a qualitative and quantitative research of bibliographical nature. We defend that photography is, among other imagistic genres, the classic example of a sign with the highest level of iconicity and that, in connection to the mathematical contextualization, it potentiates the teaching of this subject. We argue, still, about the pressing need for and education of sight, so that the image can become an instrument, not just of communication, but also, of knowledge development, as an instrument for the practice of citizenship. As a final result, we verified that the photographic image exerted, in the investigated books, the cited functions in relation to the many contents of Math, notably those linked to Geometry. Regarding the epistemic function we detected a percentage of about 65% of the computed photographs capable of mediating, expressing, saying, communicating the applied mathematical content. In this way, the insertion of the photographic image in didactic Math books contributes towards the development of the content and to the reduction of student's aversion to this subject