The Guarani counting system: pathways to pedagogical practice

Abstract

There are 21 indigenous Guarani tribes in Santa Catarina, among which are the ItatyTribe located at Morro dos Cavalos and M'BiguaçuTribe. Among the biggest challenges of these communities is the desire to revive their traditional knowledge and, in addition to it, to link it to academic knowledge so that, this way, they can understand other cultures and interact more effectively with them. Consequently, we aim to analyze the basic aspects of the counting system of these Indigenous Tribes, such as oral language, graphic symbols and manual counting; identifying the relations they have with academic mathematical knowledge. In addition, we propose activities that may enable the articulation between these two forms of knowledge. The discussions presented in this paper represent part of the research done by Autor (2011), which, guided by the Ethnographic Case Study methodology, carried out a research in the theoretical perspective of Ethnomathematics along with leaders of the Guarani communities of Itatyand M'Biguaçu.