NIn the elementary school class of the Youth and Adult Education (EJA) program, students aged 14 and 74 learn together. At first, one imagines the amount of conflicts that may exist in this environment, due to completely different ages, behaviors and ideas. But it was a climate of cooperation that Gilberto da Silva Liberato, a 3rd year Mathematics student at Unicamp, found in two municipal schools in Campinas. “They helped each other with math activities. Older students had a father-son relationship with the younger ones,” he says. Another aspect that caught Liberato's attention was the positive influence of the elderly, as teenagers who had behavioral problems in the past matured through coexistence.

Counting on the support of Fapesp for this scientific initiation research, the Unicamp graduate says that the next focus of the research will be pedagogical practice. Together with his advisor, professor Dione Lucchesi de Carvalho, Gilberto Liberato intends to produce a methodology for teaching Mathematics to young people and adults based precisely on cooperation between students. Professor Dione has been working on the topic for a few years and was the creator of the proposal to minimize barriers to teaching the subject.

In this initial work, Liberato used questionnaires as a methodology. First, around 200 students from both schools answered questions about classroom relationships, with an indication of cooperation clearly appearing in the results. From there, the graduate closed the group and selected 11 students for an interview about their academic history and their relationship with mathematics and their classmates during classes. Now, the objective is to test the methodological proposal developed in schools in the region.