A study with EJA students on the relation between school math and daily life in the perspective of literacy

Abstract

In this article we discuss some results on a research carried out with students from Youth and Adult Education (EJA). The main goal is to understand how the involved students recognize the relation between the subjects studied in the classroom with the situations in their daily lives in which Mathematics is present. The approach is based on the concepts of functional illiteracy. For data collection, we selected the following instruments: a socioeconomic questionnaire, two diagnostic activities and a conversation circle. It is a qualitative research with a descriptive design, of the ethnographic type. We discussed the data based on conceptions about mathematical literacy and we were able to observe that the students’ mathematical skills are consistent with the Brazilian context, in which there is a low rate of mathematical proficiency.