The conception and development of textbooks for distance learning courses: a case study of a teacher education course

The aim is to contribute to the research on the conception and development of mathematics textbooks for undergraduate distance education courses (EAD). In particular, we acknowledge the EAD undergraduate courses in Brazil as an important governmental initiative for teacher education. Amongst other specificities of the Brazilian model of distance education, one aspect consists of writing proper material and textbooks, raising a need to investigate the results of their conception and development. We report on a case study in which a chapter in a written textbook developed by a group of professors is analysed according to hermeneutics, describing the tessiture of the text and context of the implemented task. Aware that the task demanded processes different from those used when writing textbooks for face-to-face lecture courses, though at the same time not coinciding with the wordings of the interactions of a classroom lecture, the group of authors agreed on a notion of lessons on paper. Our analysis faces the challenge of problematising qualitative differences regarding the semiotic means of the mathematics embedded in face-to-face versus distance learning activities, raising questions on the nature of their results and the development of induced thinking in both contexts. Investigating the kind of mathematical knowledge produced for the lessons on paper texts, we drew on whether the written lesson for distance education is closer to the pedagogical-content knowledge than to the classical academic knowledge.