Numeracy and School Communities

The author defends the thesis that numeracy is not a transparent, technological process, but is related instead to the emergence of identity and school culture, to the rise of communities and institutions. The author analyses the learning processes at work in a fourth-year primary school classroom, which is offered as a best-practice case study showing in detail how strategic, communicative and critical actions are linked to one another. In the case study, the classroom activity systematically pursued critical practices, which were used by the children and the teacher to search in a published scientific text for the answer to a question that interested them. The students then drafted another text following the reasoning used by the original author.