EDITORIAL

Émerson de Pietri

In this third issue of volume 39 of Education and Research, the works gathered deal with the treatment of socio-historical processes in their relations with desired, past or projected changes in the field of Education. Distributed along four theme blocks, the organization of the articles is directed from the more properly historical treatment of the constitution of such movements, fields, disciplines, in short, to the locus of the production of knowledges in and about education, towards the observation of ethical and/or moral issues related to historically referenced educative conceptions and practices, followed by discussions on the functionalities predicted for the relation between the school and the productive world and, finally, by considerations on the effects of technological possibilities from the digital world to the pedagogical work. The volume is closed by an interview conducted by Dr. Julio Groppa Aquino with Prof Sérgio Niza, discussing themes related to the constitution of the Escola Moderna Movement and to the ways of understanding the process of evolution of this movement and its social, political, and pedagogical effects; it also deals with the previous and current situations of education in Portugal and in Brazil, offering us a fertile dialogue, now in consonance, now in counterpoint with the questions raised in the articles that precede it.

The first theme block in this issue begins with a work that brings in its title the hallmark of its condition of production: Eighty years of the Manifesto of the Pioneers of Educação Nova: questions for the debate. It was prepared for the celebration of the publication of the document referred to in the title. Bringing to discussion the modernity of this charter, Diana Gonçalves Vidal observes the historic circumstances that made possible the emergence of the Manifesto, and that would have allowed the productivity of the Escola Nova movement in Brazil. According to the author, the Escola Nova in Brazil was constituted differently from what had occurred in other countries, in such way that in the Brazilian context it did not consist of an initiative by groups of educators in specific institutions, but rather was turned into an investment of the State, bringing together reforms of the school apparatuses of states and municipalities. The Movement would in fact have been constituted by the gathering of agents from various political and ideological affiliations that organized themselves around the common objective of promoting changes in the political game for the control of the state. Such conflict-free conjunction would have been possible, at first, by the fact that the Escola Nova was constituted within the Brazilian context as a formula whose semantic coverage allowed the coexistence of multiple meanings and different modes of appropriation by subject and groups, according to the various ways in which the pedagogical, ideological and political aspects presumed by the formula in question were correlated. The Movement of the Pioneers of Educação Nova would represent the work of intellectuals in favor of a common idea of nation and in defense of principles such as laity, gratuitousness and mandatoriness of education, that produced effects at the time and still produce them today, in the sense of demanding the questioning about the school proposed today, about the role of the State in the construction of such school, and about the place that the intellectual can have in the debate and in the establishment of a public and high-quality education.

Next, we find the article by Prof Celso de Rui Beisiegel, written based on the author's participation in an academic event organized for the debate of themes in the area of Sociology of Education within the Graduate Studies Program of the School of Education of the University of São Paulo. As pointed out by Dr. Kimi Aparecida Tomizaki in the introduction to the article, it is "a beautiful text analyzing the creation of the discipline of Sociology of Education", in which some of its current dilemmas are discussed. The early period of research in sociology of education at USP presents to the reader the process of constitution of this discipline from the viewpoint of the author's experience as an undergraduate and later as a graduate student in the course of Social Sciences of the old Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of USP (FFCL-USP), as a researcher at the Regional Center for Education Research (CRPE) of São Paulo, and as a professor of sociology of education at the School of Education of USP after the creation of this discipline in the 1970 university reform. The author points out the seminal role played by the book Sociologia Educacional (Educational Sociology) by Fernando de Azevedo (1940) in the delineation of the main questions of the discipline; next, it presents the basic propositions for the research in sociology of education that were produced after the works of Florestan Fernandes and Antonio Candido, which guided the works of Prof Luiz Pereira, nowadays considered as classics. According to the author, founding elements of the sociology of education, such as the concern with the "workings of the teaching subgroups; the patterns of interaction in the school social group; the values, projects and expectations of the agents at work in the school", would have been practically abandoned nowadays as a consequence of the processes of specialization and interdisciplinarity, after which the meanings pointed out by Antonio Candido and Luiz Pereira can longer be found in the horizons of the discipline. Concluding his article, Prof Celso Beisiegel describes a central issue for researchers and teachers in the sociology of education: would specialization be compromising the very identity of the studies previously identified as proper to this discipline? This questioning can certainly be put not only before the sociology of education, but also for other disciplines in the area.

Keeping with the theme of the historic approach to educational processes, the next article is The theme of teacher education: trajectories and trends of the field in research and action by Maria Isabel da Cunha. The author observes the evolution of the field of teacher education in its epistemological, cultural and political aspects, in order to contribute to understanding the forces that historically shaped it and the possibilities and needs presented for the research today. The work covers the period that goes from the 1970s to the current moment. From the affiliation to the North American studies that marked the beginnings of the research on teacher education in this country in the 1970s, inspired by industrial organization and by the perspective of competence, productivity and control, to the observation of the relation of the teaching work with the social, political and cultural context in which it is exercised, a perspective that characterized the production of the field in the 1980s with the movements for the transformation of society towards democracy, to the discussion about the neoliberal bases and of what was proposed from them for the instrumentalization of the teacher with objective of developing the pupils competence, the author aligns herself with the critical studies that were then conducted related to the need of avoiding trivializing teacher education grounding it on generalities that are supposedly more adequate to a world under globalization. The specificities proper to the teaching profession and to teacher education are at the core of the studies critical to the generalist proposals, accentuating the complexity of the teaching work and the ethical, political and cultural questions implicated in the profession. The pragmatic perspectives that more recently grounded the studies on teacher education would have contributed, according to the author, to a revaluation of the work of the teacher, but the actual valuation of these perspectives would happen when they are associated to investigative assumptions that highlight the cultural dimension. The article closes with the presentation of a synthesis of the main points that need to be considered in the study of the processes of teacher education in their complexity. The critical review prepared by the author about the historic constitution of the field of teacher education is energizing, and puts before the researcher the need to observe the social consequences of their work, according to the assumptions and implications of the political and ideological position assumed in the research.

This first theme group is closed by the article entitled The Paraná public archives: possibilities for a research in the history of education in the provincial period by Gizele de Souza, Juarez José Tuchinski dos Anjos and Etienne Baldez Louzada Barbosa. The authors observe the relations between the historian and the archives, so as to consider the possibilities and tensions that the latter put before the work of the researcher. The relevance of the Paraná public archives would lie, among other factors, in offering to the history of education elements to investigate the 19th century, a period generally regarded as of little interest for the research in the area, given that the actions of that period related to schooling would have had no expressive development in the Imperial Brazil. Challenging this perspective, the authors reveal actions conducted during that period for the implementation of school activities, something that can be observed from the resources that the archives offer to the work of the historian, if one considers productively the possibilities that the records and their manner of archiving offer to the research in the history of education. Discussing aspects related to the process of the composition of the archives, they point out in the article the double historic time that is entailed in the work with these documents: that of their production, and that of their archiving. What was defined as important to be kept, as well as the ways in which the archiving process was operated to maintain the records, configure instigating elements to the work of the researcher in his/her objective of understanding the actions of the historic subjects and what conditioned their choices at the time.

The second group of articles that compose the present issue of Education and Research consists of works that discuss ethical, moral and political questions with which educative processes are faced due to their historic conditionings. The first article of this group discusses the possibilities and limits faced by the educator in the present days, a moment in which prevail the fragmentation of the linguistic logics and the impossibility of the sharing of ideals by subjects no longer gathered around a cultural heritage left by tradition - the fundamental semantic source of meanings in language. In Reason, meaning and formation building on a dialogue between Benjamin and Habermas, Claudia Fenerich questions if "it is possible that we find ourselves at this point in history completely devoid of generalizable knowledges that allow us to attribute non-mercantile value to human actions in the course of events". Seeking in Walter Benjamin elements that allow us to consider the constitution of the human in the shared experience, and recognizing the impossibility of finding them at this historic moment, she draws support from the project of developing communicative-discursive competence a possibility of constitution of an intersubjective space conditioned by a secularized rationality, according to her reading of Habermas. A return to Benjamin becomes, however, necessary because language, in its fragmentary logic and grounded in reason and secularity, would be emptied of signification if it was not rooted in a meaning, even if not directly accessible. The debates in the public sphere would, thus, be always based in values, conceptions of the good and of happiness, with which rationality grounds itself in value and ethical contents of individuals and groups. The true, the good and the beautiful, even if they can no longer be taken as absolute parameters, resonate in subjectivities because they are grounded in basic moral patterns that can be found outside the self. Resorting to Charles Taylor, the author points to the signification that is produced not with the transmission of an experience, but with the very disposition to transmit it, with which experience acquires a non-subjective character, because actualized between one subject and another, and therefore connected to sources other than those restricted to individuality.

In School (in)justice: is the classical concept of education democratization cornered? by Ione Ribeiro Valle the problems pertinent to the political, cultural and moral constitution of contemporary societies are also discussed. The author defends that "old issues need to be re-signified", among them: "How do we face inequalities and resist the practices of social reproduction? How do we position ourselves before the unity of science and the plurality of cultures? What ends should the school pursue? Which knowledges to teach? How to distinguish school meritocracy such as perceived by individuals from the idealized school meritocracy? How do we educate the teaching staff and how to prepare for the unprecedented advance of technology?" The recovery of the principles that underlie these questionings implies discussing the fundamentals that would ideally guide the offer of schooling in the movements undertaken by democratic societies: the equality of opportunities and the school meritocracy. The author draws from four theoretical approaches to deal with the theme of school (in)justice: from John Rawls she takes the notion of "justice as equity"; based on the theories of social contract by Michael Walzer she recovers the idea of a "society complexly egalitarian", with which she attempts to redefine a moral principle "of Aristotelian basis, grounded in virtues and not in universal principles"; from Barrington Moore, Jr. she considers the meanings of injustice created from the observation of social and historic conditions "in which moral indignation is manifested more intensely throughout the 19th and 20th centuries"; finally, from François Dubet she observes means to bring to other domains elements developed in the field of the sociology of education to deal with themes such as "justice, labor, education, professional identities, school trajectories, impacts of professional formation in the feelings of workers". Based on the principle that the notion of school justice is a concept under construction, the author then discusses the principles of equality of opportunities and of school meritocracy, pointing to the need to observe the contradictions that are produced in the struggle between the ideal of education as possibility of social justice through the promotion of equality, and the working of the school to cater for the interests of the privileged classes.

Bilingual Education in the United States: possible moral transition toward global citizenship by Anna Carolina Barbosa concludes this theme group by turning to ethical, moral and political questions. A study of theoretical nature, the article presents considerations about the controversy established within the current North American context as to the objectives of education: should it be oriented towards interculturality, in order to respond to the demands for a citizenship that project itself globally, or should it be circumscribed to a monolingual curriculum based on a conservative conception of citizenship, referenced to a principle of cultural closeness. In dealing with this controversy, the author develops a reflection about the ethical and moral questions implied in each of those conflicting trends, defending that this situation points to a moment of transition in which the North American society finds itself. The working hypothesis is that the movement of opposition to the establishment of bilingual education in the curricula of the country, in favor of an education based solely on the English language, could "be understood as a political, social and academic manifestation of a resistance against the transition from a stage of moral monism to a stage of moral pluralism". According to the author, the programs of bilingual education could represent the access to a more humanist and democratic American citizenship. The movement against an education focused on the intercultural would therefore constitute an attempt to maintain the status quo on the part of groups that seek to guarantee the continuity of their privileges. However, the article proposes that such struggle is futile, given that "the end of moral monism is probably as inevitable as the fall of any political and social Empire".

The third theme group brings together articles discussing the relations between schooling and society, considering the modes in which such relations have been constituted historically as a function of social, economic and/or cultural elements. The block begins with an article entitled Schooling policies and governmentality in the schemes of cognitive capitalism: a preliminary diagnostic by Roberto Rafael Dias da Silva. In his work, the author observes the modes of constitution of schooling policies in the capitalist society spanning the period from the 18th century to the current days. The consolidation of the productive mode of industrial capitalism meant an emphasis on organization of military inspiration and on the production of stabilizing narratives that guarantee the discipline of subjects supported by a rationalized time, a "long-term, cumulative and predictable" time. By the end of the 20th century we find the "new capitalism" that defined the productive organization, not the management, but the actions of capital; not bureaucracy, but the fluxes of global capital, the "impatient capital" that demands flexibility and dynamics; the technologies of instantaneous communication and information. The values recognized since then refer to flexibility, to autonomy, to innovation, to free circulation and entrepreneurial spirit. This logic of the capitalist productive world would then be reproduced in the education processes, in which we would move from the collective to the individual; from teaching to learning; from production to innovation; from repetition to invention. The author points to the fact that the social transformations, redirected from an industrial capitalism to a cognitive capitalism, steered the schooling policies towards a more flexible and interactive education whose objective would be that of qualifying schooling subjects in modernity to the increment of their productive performance. It is an instigating article that prompts the reader to a decisive movement regarding the critique of the current model of schooling.

In the second article of this theme group we find the discussion of the character that should be conferred to Secondary Education, the last stage of basic schooling, so that it may become a stage in the process of transformation of school from its current status as a servant of the interests of the capital towards a school that will guarantee an integral human formation, which would have as its "structuring axis the work, the science, the technology and the culture". In the article entitled Integrated secondary education: subsumption to the interests of the capital or crossing towards an integral human formation? Dante Henrique Moura discusses in those terms what would be the meaning attributed to secondary education considered the need of a great portion of the population to engage in paid work before the age of 18 in order to provide their economic subsistence. The modality of secondary education integrated to secondary-level technical professional education could represent a possibility of constructing historically an omnilateral, integral or polytechnic school for everyone. Based on the ideas of Marx, Engels, Gramsci and of authors that dialogue with them, the text questions the professional education in adolescence, because it is unilateral, and presents the need of considering at a given historic moment the potentiality offered by professional education as long as it is associated to intellectual, physical and technological education. Along the same lines, he points to the need of a real political action that would dissolve the current organization of the school system, which responds to the duality of the system it serves, grounded in the distinction between intellectual and manual work. The article discusses fundamental issues for the debate about the curriculum structure of basic education in order to question the assignment of school after the interests of the capital, and to project its function in an integral human education.

The relation between school and society is also the central theme of the article by Mitsi Pinheiro de Lacerda, which closes this third theme group, but here the focus lies on the relations between school curriculum and daily practices. In The small town, the school and the interrupted daily life the author uses an ethnographic perspective to investigate how school practices have moved toward the city daily life, defining the organization of times, spaces and actions. The author takes as her point of departure the assumption that modernity has disciplined daily life, reducing it to a sphere of repetition, pragmatism, common sense and routine. This belittlement would serve the purposes of the market, since the rupture with the non-cumulative process characteristic of daily life would then lead to a continual demand for new objects, which in their turn would quickly become obsolete. Going against what the scientific mindset attributes to daily life, the researcher considers nevertheless the legitimacy of dealing with it as the locus of production of knowledges, and turns her attention to its investigation observing the practices developed in social spaces, so as to learn the logic of practitioners. This work investigates the processes of appropriation that are established between school curricula and daily practices in a circular process of mutual feedback. According to the laws of the place in which they live, subjects thus create a plurality with their tactics and manners of usage that produce unpredictable effects: "In this movement, we find the consumption by practitioners that appropriate the artifacts used in the parades, transforming the residues of a prescribed curriculum into curricula practiced at schools, as well as their tactics, changing school results through opportunities perceived in the field of the other". Based on concepts proposed by Michel de Certeau, and making use of methodological resources from oral history, it is very interesting to observe how the author confers an effect of distancing, of historical perspective to the observation of contemporary facts, which makes her reading of the facts (and the reading of the article itself) still more interesting.

The questions presented to educational processes by technological innovations are the theme of the last group of articles that comprise this issue of Education and Research. The common thread of these articles is the pointing out the need for changes in teaching practices that would bring the availability of technological innovation to educative processes, an availability that is promoted by actions of support by academic institutions and/or areas of the government. In this sense, in Interactive whiteboards in education: an evaluation from the studies in the area Patrícia Alexandra da Silva Ribeiro Sampaio and Clara Maria Gil Fernandes Pereira Coutinho observe the didactic possibilities offered by interactive whiteboards, a kind of equipment taken to Portuguese schools under a state project of distribution of technological resources and formation for the didactic appropriation of these resources: the Technological Plan in Education. The authors propose to carry out a bibliographic survey on the advantages and disadvantages of the use of interactive whiteboards within the teaching context, and also to observe the way in which teachers have integrated these resources into their pedagogical practices. They point out the need for teachers to keep themselves up-to-date, so as to manage more efficiently their time and to produce more creative, diversified and interactive activities to be presented to pupils. The objective here is to promote a learning environment that invites students to be more interested in participating in the teaching process. Studies referred to in the article showed the need for teacher training in the use of the technologies of information and communication, given that the teacher is the main responsible for the satisfactory use of these resources within a teaching context. Another point highlighted in the text is the resistance from teachers to implement the use of interactive whiteboards in their classes, in view of the fact that the process would entail the need to review routines and acquired habits.

The training of teachers in the use of new technologies is also the theme of the article entitled Distance education of licentiateship teachers: the case of the pedagogy course at UAB/UECE by Viviani Maria Barbosa Sales and João Batista Carvalho Nunes. The authors observe the difficulties to implement a distance education (DE) course due to the prevalence of practices characteristic of traditional presence courses: the lack of specific training for the teachers responsible for distance education courses would stop them from reconfiguring elements of the teachers culture so as to adapt to the possibilities and needs of forms of interaction mediated by the technologies of information. It would therefore be necessary to take into account the relation that is established between educators and technological innovations, and the ensuing effects of this new context for the process of autonomous learning, which should be constituted under these conditions of education. A factor that hinders the satisfactory implementation of DE, also related to the forms in which academic culture is traditionally constituted, is related to the discontinuous manner in which these courses are offered. Such discontinuity would prevent teachers from building links with this modality of teaching, hampering the satisfactory development of teacher education, and consequently the development of a culture proper to the formative processes in projects of distance education. Adding to the difficulties there is the lack of teachers with specific training for working with DE. The authors point out, therefore, the need to implement changes in the organization of the course observed in their work, so that a different academic culture may be constituted, more adequate this more recent formative context, and so that then new forms of teaching and learning may be actually established. Lastly, we should highlight the association constructed in the article between the offer of formation based on new technologies and the needs of innovation, of continued education, and of constant updating posed by society nowadays. The article therefore aims to question what is the function of the school and academic institutions in the transformation or maintenance of current social, political and economic conditions.

Closing this group, the article entitled The students' motivation to use the wiki technology: a practical study in higher education authored by Carolina Costa, Helena Alvelos and Leonor Teixeira is focused on the observation of the modes in which are assimilated the technological resources of the wiki type in teaching and learning processes, according to the expression of the subjects involved in the formative practices analyzed. Wiki is based on the WEB 2.0 technology, and appears as a "completely open web space where any user can modify, structure and organize documents in various ways". This study focused on the observation of what the research subjects perceived as useful aspects that this technology offered to increase their performance at work, and on observing their motivation for the frequent use of this resource according to their positive or negative evaluation of it. The investigation revealed that students' assessments as to the advantages of the technology were more positive regarding the possibilities of interaction without the need for physical presence of participants or for a definition of a common working schedule for the members of the team in order to develop activities. With regard to the use of time and improvements in learning, however, the evaluations presented by students regarding their experiences did not have an equally expressive positive level. The same is valid for the considerations about their dissatisfaction with the fact that texts produced in activities could be accessed and read before their conclusion by their authors, which could expose deficiencies during the process of writing, apart from opening to others the possibility of altering the texts in a sense not foreseen by the original authors, or still, that ideas could be appropriated and utilized by colleagues without the consent of their original proponent(s). In this sense, the article brings important contributions for the discussions around the changes in teaching and learning processes promoted by technological innovations, not just by offering to the reader ideas about how to use these resources in didactic proposals, and about proposals for studies on this theme in various contexts, but also with regard to the oppositions presented between the possibilities offered by the digital world and the principles and practices proper to the written culture.

This issue of Education and Research concludes with an interview given by Prof Sérgio Niza to Dr. Julio Groppa Aquino. In it, Prof Sérgio Niza describes the time of his initial education as a teacher, the implications of the military dictatorship to his formative and professional path, and also the relations he established with the Escola Nova movement and with Freinet's shift towards what he called Escola Moderna (Modern School). He emphasizes then what would characterize specifically the Portuguese Escola Moderna Movement (MEM), highlighting the collective and cooperative work of formation between teachers based on school culture. In the initial moments of the Movement, the cooperative work represented an opposition to the State project of separation, of isolation of teachers so as to prevent their coming together. When dealing with the Escola da Ponte, he draws considerations about what would distinguish its proposal from the one that grounds the Escola Moderna Movement, pointing out the valuation of the individual in the experience established by José Pacheco vis-à-vis the principle of collectivity that supports the teaching education actions in the MEM. Apart from that, he also questions if the initial project of the Escola da Ponte would still hold after the changes in management of the institution and the way in which its mentor conceives the publicizing of such experience. Lastly, he evaluates the changes occurred in the teaching processes in Portugal and considers the longer period that must be taken to obtain substantial changes in school culture. Nevertheless, he calls attention to the urgency of this change, which is paradoxically needed by the capital itself, responsible as it is for the emptying of school culture, and at the same time that the capital becomes more and more dependent of the school for its own production. Prompted to discuss the Brazilian educational reality, he comments on the duality of our education system that has in the private school the alternative of privileged social classes to educate their children, in detriment of a public school that needs, therefore, real investments by the Brazilian state in order to guarantee quality education for everyone.

The highly mobilizing ideas of Prof Sérgio Niza resonate in the discussions conducted in the articles that comprise this issue of Education and Research, bringing forward the struggles historically constituted by subject and groups concerned with the construction of a public, free, and quality school for everyone, and the battles against projects of teacher education and reconfiguration of school culture that aim at maintaining social and economic inequalities. In a historic perspective, he observes the movements of resistance and support to educational objectives that want to impede the forces of emancipation that can take the school as a formative and liberating space. A politically committed analysis and a theoretically grounded critique concur to reveal the tensions and the possibility of a well-grounded position. Let us hope that this issue of Education and Research contributes to the conception of a transformative school.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  16 Sept 2013
• Date of issue
  Sept 2013