A matemática da miniempresa: conhecimentos para desenvolver visões empreendedoras no contexto escolar

Abstract

This work presents a qualitative research that involved students of the senior year of High School, and its main theme of development is entrepreneurship in education, whose application intends to form critic and active subjects for the social environment, with the ability of constructing knowledge in personal financial management. We aim at discussing didactical practices in Math classes that supported the application of an external program in the school, promoted by Junior Achievement, a non-profit organization that fosters economical and business education at school. During the meetings of the Miniempresa program, the students could experience situations common to management, production, marketing and sales practices, in a kind of game that simulated the creation of a small company. Besides that, the students chose the product on which think and build up their enterprise and, based on it, were instructed to consider its productive feasibility according to its acceptance by costumers. In the Math classes, that are object of this research and were taken in parallel to the Miniempresa program, Math activities on financial formation were realized, and each possibility and requirement from the employment world was discussed as well. The objective of these interventions was, then, to complement the students’ formation for an active and committed social action. The methodology chosen for the classes was structured based on a questionnaire of previous knowledge and organized in three didactic units. Inspired by the ideas of Antoni Zabala, these didactic units prioritized that students worked in small groups, which allowed them valuing their individual initiatives. Records from these classes are presented in various media, such as teacher notes, photographs, explanations and students’ productions. The theoretical basis of this work is the theory meaningful and collaborative learning, proposed by Lev Vygotsky and David Ausubel, and served as a key to interpret the results obtained. As a complement to it, we adopted the perspective of the citizen school, by Moacir Gadotti, and, in relation to entrepreneurship seen as Science, we have Fernando Dolabela and José Dornelas as the main references. With regard to the results, it is possible to affirm that the analysis and the interpretation of the obtained data gave rise to indications of significant learning achieved by the researched students. Along the classes, the students also developed study initiatives using technological resources, with emphasis on the HP 12C financial calculator. Lastly, the resignification of errors was adopted as a way of learning and encouraging the debate among the students. As a final product of this work, a didactic plan of a potentially significant nature is proposed, in order to make its analysis and application available to teachers.