Abstract

This article is a synthesis of a doctoral research that inquired: what is this, Mathematical Investigation in Mathematics Education? The corpus of analysis was composed of twelve academic works that proved to be significant in the field of Mathematical Investigation in Mathematics Education, with which the data was constructed. From a phenomenology-hermeneutics standpoint, Mathematical Investigation in Mathematics Education could be understood in two intersecting spheres expressed as a way of doing mathematics, and as a way of teaching mathematics. As a way of doing mathematics, it revealed itself to value conjectures, tests, generalizations, and demonstrations as its modus operandi; and, as a way of teaching mathematics, it revealed itself idealizing the scientific experience of the construction of knowledge in mathematics for the classroom, conceiving the doing of students and teachers as an imitation, as an act like a mathematician would. In this article, these aspects are opened hermeneutically, in order to make explicit the meanings for Mathematics Education.

Mathematical Investigation; Philosophy of Mathematics Education; Phenomenology-hermeneutics; Doing Mathematics; Teaching Mathematics