"How do we learn?" This has been an intriguing question for educators, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists and neurologists who strive to understand and explain the cognitive, social and emotional processes involved in this essential human experience. If the nature and diversity of these processes are studied by a broad variety of disciplines, it is because they directly or indirectly affect our behavior, habits, beliefs and values with undeniable social and historic repercussions.
In the first article of this issue of the Revista Brasileira de Educação (RBE), Christoph Wulf, of the Freie Universität Berlin, articulates anthropology and philosophy to attain an intriguing perspective. In his text entitled "Cultural learning and mimicry: games, rituals and gestures", the author affirms that the human capacity to act in society is acquired by mimicry, through different cultural processes of learning that are present in games, rituals and gestures. Thus, understood in the broad sense "cultural learning is mimetic learning." Mimicry is primarily analyzed from a historic and philosophical perspective and then discussed using the example of a daily ritual that expresses the learning of practical knowledge in mimetic processes.
Three articles follow in which learning is related to evaluation. The article, "Characterization of learning evaluation in multifunctional resource rooms for students with intellectual disabilities", by Alexandra Ayach Anache and Dannielly Araújo Rosado Resende, provides a detailed description of the processes, criteria and contingencies of the evaluation of these students' learning. The authors observe that the evaluation of school learning is understood to be synonymous with the evaluation of academic performance and that the difficulties or identification of improper behavior constitute the criteria for a referral and evaluation of students with intellectual deficiencies. The objective of the article, "Scale of strategies and motivation for learning in virtual environments", by Andrea Carvalho Beluce and Katya Luciane de Oliveira, is to present a scale for teaching strategy, learning and motivation in virtual environments. It involves a psychometric study guided by the specificities of virtual environments and as such, the study proposes an instrument for measurement and diagnosis. The next article, which articulates learning and evaluation, "Prevention and remediation of learning difficulties: adaptation of response to an intervention model in a Brazilian sample", Roselaine Pontes de Almeida, Carolina Julien Mattar de Toledo Piza, Thiago da Silva Gusmão Cardoso and Mônica Carolina Miranda, question programs based on response to intervention and discuss results of a study that sought to adapt this model of "prevention and remediation of learning difficulties" to the Brazilian context, as an alternative for the evaluation and intervention with students with these needs.
The article by Fernando Augusto Treptow Brod and Sheyla Costa Rodrigues, "The conversation as a strategy for continued formation in the tutorship of professional distance education", involves the pedagogical mediation of instructors in distance education courses in the e-Tec network. The study found a need for greater interaction among instructing professors and research professors, and for a deepening of the discussion about the action of instruction. Given these results, the authors suggest establishing norms for a network of collaborative conversation between instructing professors and research professors, as a proposal for continuing education.
A second group of five articles contemplates higher education. The first article in this group, "Social responsibility of higher education: mapping and thematic tendencies of Brazilian scientific production (1990-2011)", by Adolfo Ignacio Calderón, Cleber Fernando Gomes and Regilson Maciel Borges, presents the state of the art of scientific production about the social responsibility of higher education based on master's dissertations and doctoral theses defended in different fields in Brazil from 1990 to 2011. The article discusses the three thematic lines identified: university administration, theoretical-conceptual and normative aspects and university education. Upon finding that there are more studies about the themes in graduate programs in administration, the authors suggest some hypotheses for why there are fewer studies of the issue in education departments. The second article, "Teaching in a professional master's: registers of perceptions and practices (re) construction", by Marlise Heemann Grassi, Miriam Ines Marchi, Rogério José Schuck and Silvana Neumann Martins, addresses the "epistemological realities, the competencies, abilities and perspectives" of professors in a professional mater's course in science and mathematics education. It describes and discusses concepts related to various aspects of the work of professors in this modality of a master's program.
The title of the third article, by Adair Mendes Nacarato, questions the "The university-school parternship: utopia or a possibility of extended training in the public policy domain?". The article considers teacher education and public policies aimed at the teacher education programs proposed by the Ministry of Education. It considers theoretical constructs developed in recent decades by educational research and how they have been appropriated and resignified by public policies. The paper then presents results of a study conducted in the realm of the Observatory of Education program, which indicates the opportunity for partnerships between universities and schools that stimulate reflection and criticism from professors about these publics. In the fourth article, "Higher education in Brazil: dilemmas, challenges and comparison with OECD and BRICS countries", Nelson Cardoso Amaral analyzes various indicators of the Brazilian context including: privatization, net and gross schooling fees, socioeconomic limits to expansion of both public and private schooling, ratio of candidates to openings, and unfilled openings - and compares them with indicators from various OECD countries and the BRICS. It found the great challenges that Brazil must face so that it can attain the OECD parameters and suggests some conditions needed to make them possible. This set of articles about higher education concludes with the article by María Luisa Castro Estrada, María José Rodriguez Rejas and Emiliano Urteaga Urías, "The open classroom: links between learning process, research practise and community cooperation", which reports on an experience of working at the Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México among professors and students. The objective of the authors is to present their conception of the open class: "a tie between education, research and community cooperation". The strategy for open classes has two main lines: the interdisciplinary and that of community cooperation. The article also considers the possibilities for research and transformation of urban spaces and invites rethinking the meaning of the university today based on the concept of the open classroom.
The final article of this issue, "Ethics in research with children: absences and challenges", by Natália Fernandes, analyzes this important issue for researchers who are dedicated to the study of children. Dialoging with the sociology of childhood, the article considers various aspects related to this issue. To do so, it presents a survey of the debate about the issue and raises some challenges to be faced to make possible "a viable ethic" in research with children. It alerts that this implies considering the issues of power that are established between adults and children, the hierarchies of protocol and their contribution to the epistemological invisibility of children in studies and how the authorship of children and adults can be preserved in the analysis, interpretation and production of data, among other issues.
In the Reviews section, Maria Cecília Mollica comments on the collection Os doze trabalhos de Hércules: do oral para o escrito, [The Twelve Labors of Hercules: from the Oral to the Written], organized by Stella Maris Bortoni-Ricardo and Veruska Ribeiro Machado, whose chapters portray some of the numerous obstacles faced by school education, in particular those referring to the learning and teaching of reading and writing.
This edition of the Revista Brasileira de Educação, which portrayed themes such as learning, higher education and ethics in research, reiterates the journal's concern for contributing to the promotion of research in the field, encompassing distinct approaches and perspectives of analysis. In this way the issue expresses RBE's permanent effort to consolidate and deepen the salient issues of Brazilian educational reality, including the (recent) institutionalization of a Basic National Common Curriculum, through a qualification of the increasingly necessary debate. In 2015, the Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Educação (ANPEd) and the Associação Brasileira de Currículo (ABdC) manifest, through an Exposition of Motives, their profound disagreements with the proposal for the Basic National Common Curriculum, which was presented for public consultation. These two associations affirmed that the concepts of curriculum, evaluation, students rights to learning and the work of teachers that are at the foundation of the proposed Basic National Common Curriculum, do not guarantee the valorization of and right to diversity, countering the interest of quality public schooling that is universal, free of charge and secular. In this context, the debates about this issue demonstrate how significant the contributions of educational research have been to support the debate and for a criticism of the direction of education in Brazil.
Finally, it should be mentioned that this issue marks a transition in the editorship of RBE. Carlos Eduardo Vieira is concluding his six-year term of work, three as section editor (2010-2013) and three as editor (2013-2016). Antonio Carlos Rodrigues de Amorim, is concluding his mandate as section editor (2013-2016) and with this issue is assuming the position of editor of RBE. We would thus like to register the recognition of the work of the editor who is leaving RBE and greet the new editor, who faces the challenge of insuring that RBE remains a reference for promotion and circulation of educational research.
With the expectation that this issue will help to support new studies and confrontations in the field, we wish everyone good reading!
Rio de Janeiro, July 2016.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jul-Sep 2016
