Northeast Mathematical Education Network: professional development and statistical teaching from a critical and equity perspective

The paper aims to discuss the professional development of teachers who teach mathematics who participated in an online formative process, carried out within a professional learning community, which addressed equity in the teaching of statistical concepts. Research was based on theoretical references of Professional Development, principles and dimensions of equity for learning in mathematics and characteristics of professional learning community. The research was developed by the Northeast Mathematics Education Network (REM-NE), composed of eight universities located in four states in the Brazilian Northeast and one in the Southeast. The formative process took place in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemy, with 51 teachers from eight REM-NE elementary and middle partner schools, being completed by 38. The RePARe spiral (reflection-planning-action-reflection) was used for the formative actions distributed in the Large Group with all teachers and researchers and Small Groups composed of approximately six teachers and one researcher (former). The entire process took place online, using Telegram or WhatsApp and the tools from the G-suite package: Google Classroom, Drive, Meet and Google Forms. To achieve the objective of this article, we analyzed data collected in the Large Group meetings: the recordings; journals of nine training meetings; profile instrument; diagnosis of specific knowledge; questionnaire about the perspective on equity a and journals from the Small Groups. Research data were analyzed and the results indicate that teacher education needs to value and enhance the professional development of teachers, in order to address: specific knowledge (in this research, statistical concepts); knowledge about teaching practices that enable working with the student; involvement of the school community addressing themes, difficulties and phenomena inherent to the noosphere in which the teacher is inserted; participation of the university in formative processes, constituting professional learning communities; having critical education as a training scenario and valuing work with equity; provide the use of technological tools; value the processes of reflection and collaborative planning. The results indicate that these are inherent and necessary points to be considered in a training process aimed at professional development.