Constance Kamii's legacy to brazilian education

Abstract

This bibliographical and documentary study aims to present part of the trajectory of Constance Kamii, a renowned scientist, a collaborator of Jean Piaget, her works and publications in Brazil. Taking the construction of knowledge as a reference, Kamii dedicated herself to school education, carrying out theoretical-practical investigations with implications based on Piagetian theory. She studied Piaget's work in depth and worked experimentally in the classroom. It affected the teaching of arithmetic in kindergarten and in the early years of elementary school by finding, through research, that the early teaching of algorithms hinders the development of children's number sense. She presented ways to improve teaching in the classroom, based on a scientific theory and explaining how children acquire intellectual and moral knowledge and autonomy. For Kamii, the starting point of all learning is the subject itself, the child is the protagonist, is active, compares, excludes, orders, categorizes, reformulates, proves, formulates hypotheses, reorganizes... Thanks to Kamii and Piaget, today we know that the processes that lead to elementary mathematical notions do not involve memorization or mechanical activities of reproduction. Owner of a vast body of work, she was one of the scientists who most highlighted, promoted and adapted Piaget's thinking to education.