Machines and numbers: Translations of Nicole Picard’s texts in Porto Alegre during the 1970s

Abstract

Machines and Numbers: Translations of Nicole Picard’s texts in Porto Alegre during the 1970s. The article focuses on readings, translations, and quotations of Nicole Picard’s texts by teachers at the Instituto de Educação General Flores da Cunha, in Porto Alegre, in the 1960s and 1970s. The translations are interpreted as evidence of an encounter, through texts, between teachers who sought to renew the teaching of mathematics in elementary school, in France, and in Brazil. Among the themes addressed, the study of machines as representations of operators, aiming at the understanding of numerical operations, stands out. In the context of the modern mathematics movement, the meeting was favored by the shared valorization of active methods, Piagetian psychology, and the classroom as an object and scope of research on learning.