An Analysis of the Use of Graphs in People’s Daily Life
This paper addresses the issue of the lack of connection between people’s knowledge and school mathematics. It is stated that this issue generates a phenomenon of opacity in People’s Daily Life and the uses of mathematical knowledge; this means that other social functions of the mathematical knowledge apart from school environments are not considered. To highlight this phenomenon, empirical evidence is built from the analysis of cultural forms of knowledge concerning the uses of graphs in a movement situation; this evidence is overshadowed by school mathematics because they are immerse in non-conventional argumentations. A reference framework of the uses of graphs that resignifies trajectory and curve is then conformed; in this framework the search for permanence and invariants when things vary conforms a proper argumentation of people’s mathematical knowledge that is, however, obscured in school mathematics.