Teachers in Primary Education: The Choice between the New Contents Learned in Higher Education and the Same Old Methodologies

Abstract

This paper presents a research carried out in the Amazon, specifically in the state of Pará, Brazil, where the implementation of workshops in the field of elementary mathematics presented to teachers from Pedagogy degree. To develop such a proposal, the workshop is centered on two main issues: Discussion on triggering vectors of some topics in arithmetic and geometry that are part of the content taught to students from the first to the fifth year; questionnaire on which methods of these topics are taught to students or whether teachers choose only one method for each topic and/or whether they use new (active?) methodologies learned during graduation. The results and the speeches indicate that traditional methods are widely used. On the other hand, teachers who participated in the workshops are strongly willing to change their strategies in teaching elementary mathematics to children.