Ecologia do saber: o ensino de limite em um curso de engenharia

Abstract

This research falls in line with the Epistemological Program in Didatics of Mathematics from the work of Guy Brousseau, having as theoretical reference Yves Chevallard's Antropological Theory of Didatic. The research question has established itself from a real educational problem, experienced by a professor of Differential and Integral Calculus of a civil engineering course, when the Calculus I course was replaced by another with a different name and more topics to teach, offering However, half the teaching time of old. Due to these modifications, the teaching of the limit of a real function of a real variable suffered changes and its dispensability started being questioned. The investigation of practices with Mathematics in an undergraduate course, and the researcher proposes a heuristic model for ecological educational analysis that enables the identification of the functionalities of the researched mathematical object, such as its niche, in the Civil Engineering teaching ecosystem habitat. The empirical components were obtained from the immersion held in the institution of higher education, user of mathematics, when the course's Pedagogical Project was researched, teachers were interviewed and reference works and practices were analysed based on the proposed model. The didactic praxeologies involving the limit of a function were analysed based on the proposed model. The analysis found the "life forms" of the researched mathematical object, which allowed the understanding that justifies the indispensability of its teaching in the researched ecosystem, but which also suggests transpositives that are necessary because of the ecological differences between the producing and consumer institutions of this knowledge.