Mobilizations of the uses of numbers and their registers in the production and in the government of conducts in school practices

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating how numbers used in school practices operate strategically to govern the individual in contemporary times. I have drawn on Michel Foucault and Ludwig Wittgenstein, to deepen the notion of practices, taking them closely associated to human activities and ways of life established by the language. I have observed classroom scenes, attending a literacy class in its primary first and second year in 2011 and 2012. I analyze deconstructively school practices, noting how the teacher and students use them in activities. I have also observed, when pertinent, children’s written activities. Encouraging practice games that used to happen in school have been my research focus, as well searching for trails for other practices in these school scenes. What has been shaped philosophically from a mathematics problem of undisciplined ones, were different uses of language, focusing on numbers and ways in which they operate in children’s daily lives in their literacy process, not restricting this use to mathematics contents as a disciplinary field. These practice games mobilize truth games, producing and guiding conducts, transforming children into student subjects. Telling the truth in the classroom is present in different ways by different tools the teacher used, by her speech, and students’, their gestures, and proposed activities. What is significant is the game that is shaped in displacements from one practice to another. The school may problematize different practice games in different ways when it practices these games.