When the school expels, street work is an opportunity to dream

Abstract

The present article arises from a project proposed along with the students of the Mathematics Licentiate degree at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), who at the time were studying a course, in the evening period, in Elementary Education Mathematics. The project was motivated by a street salesman and its objective was to understand mathematics, more specifically school algebra, where other people did not. Based on the productions and reflections of this project, this article aims to identify meanings that are produced about working on the street. For that, the corpus of analysis will be the interviews with two black men who work on the street and the interview with one of the students of the mentioned course. Theoretically, we are linked to critical studies, with decolonial inspiration. For the analysis of the discourses arising from the interviews, we adopted the Discourse Analysis from the perspective of Eni Orlandi, in order to answer the research question: what are the meanings produced about working on the street? The analysis resulted in three meanings about working on the street from the interviews with the workers and one meaning about mathematics from the interview with the student of the Mathematics Licentiate degree. The observed meanings point to street work as an opportunity to dream when facing expulsion from school, as a risk to be taken due to the devaluation of the formal labor market and also as a stigma; the meaning attributed to mathematics refers to its distance from social experience.