Approaches to the history of mathematics in textbooks: what aspects are emphasized in Brazilian research?

Abstract

The history of mathematics is a pedagogical resource used in classrooms, recommended by official documents and, for this reason, present in textbooks. As for these, they are a free distributed material in Brazilian public schools and, consequently, are the most common material used by teachers. The aim of this research is to understand the relationship between the history of mathematics and textbooks from a bibliographic research. A systematized Bibliographic Research was carried out with a search for publications in journals published by the Sociedade Brasileira de Educação Matemática (Brazilian Society of Mathematics Education) on its website, whose articles were published from 2011 to 2021. A first search was made by reading each title individually, and we obtained 61 articles. After a selection based on the abstracts, we reduced it to 22 texts, and finally, by checking the use of the term “livro didático" (textbook) in these texts, we focused our efforts on 9 works. Then, we elaborated three emerging and convergent themes that emerged from the results and discussions of the articles, namely: reasons regarding the presence of the history of mathematics in textbooks; how the history of mathematics is presented in textbooks; and teacher education regarding the history of mathematics.