Passageiras da tarde: uma etnografia sobre práticas de numeramento com alfabetizandas idosas, usuárias do transporte coletivo de Uberaba

Abstract

This study aims to understand how elderly women in the process of learning to read and write mobilize numeracy practices in specific contexts. To this end, we followed six students from Youth and Adult Education (EJA), students at a municipal school and users of public transportation in the city of Uberaba, in Minas Gerais, during the second semester of 2023. Throughout the study, we analyzed their daily experiences in two environments: a literacy classroom and a bus terminal, with the development of an ethnographic research, of a qualitative nature, carried out through participant observations together with interviews conducted with the study participants. During the research, we focused our analyses on numeracy practices experienced in the two previously mentioned environments, which demanded from the students positions, prohibitions and decision-making permeated by their own strategies, ideas and values. During the analyses, we adopted an intersectional perspective, highlighting the social markers of gender, age group and education, but also considering other equally important markers, such as race, class and geographic origin, present in the participants who give life to this research. With this, we realized that the numeracy practices experienced by elderly women who are learning to read and write are permeated by their specificities as sociocultural subjects, demanding the development of their own strategies, on the part of these literacy students, to deal with everyday situations in our graphocentric society, and providing different ways of signifying and conceiving the social uses of mathematical knowledge, thus attributing to the teaching of mathematics during the literacy process the challenge of expanding mathematical notions to confront transgressions, to develop autonomy and to guarantee fundamental rights, such as the right to come and go in daily commutes. Furthermore, the discussions produced contribute to thinking about public policies aimed at literacy for young people, adults and the elderly and to rethinking the training of mathematics teachers and the teaching of mathematics in EJA.