This study – in recovering elements of the history of the art of Portuguese
tiles, examining the specific mode of re-appropriation of this art as performed
in its colony, Brazil, and the hybridization process undergone by the tiles on
returning to the metropolis – indicates three issues that are directly implicated
in Mathematics Education.
The first of them concerns the cultural hybridization process. Different
from the more deterministic perspectives that discuss the relationship between
the metropolis and its colonies, understanding this process as a mere
imposition in the sphere of the social, the economic and the cultural worlds of
dominant groups over the dominated ones, this study about the art of tiles
showed that this process was not limited to a mere subordination, a mere
repetition of overseas culture in the colony. There is a sort of re-invention of
the invention, which transform the art of tiles in Brazil into ‘another” art. But
the hybridization process of the art of tiles does not end there. On its voyage
back to the metropolis, it is already this “other” art that returns home.
Emphasizing this discontinuity, this fragmentation, this permanent reinvention
process, that does not seek “authenticity” to despise the copy,
indicates a broader and more complex understanding of what “culturalizing
Mathematics Education”, i.e., its cultural dimension could be.
The second issue relating to the Mathematics Education presented by this
investigation concerns the possibilities of establishing close connections
between it and the field of History, by studying the art of tiles. At least as
regards the former colony called Brazil, the complex hybridization process
involved in this art has been systematically silenced in school curricula.
Narratives about the colonial period have limited themselves to a political and
economic vision of imperialist domination, leaving aside its cultural and
aesthetic dimensions. The art of tiles may constitute one of the possibilities of
incorporating these dimensions into the school curriculum, emphasizing the
hues, nuances and tensions involved in the history of colonization processes.
Ultimately, it is to subvert the narratives of the hegemonic colonizing
discourse.
The study indicates a third issue referring to Mathematics Education. Here,
it is important to examine the possibilities of seeing the plan isometries – a set
of knowledges that are part of the school curriculum in the West – not “in and
of themselves”, not essentialized, but as mathematical tools with a potential to
favour the fruition of art. Maybe one could think of art and other fields of
knowledge as equally “worthy” of escaping the sidelines on which the modern