EDITORIAL

Access to scientific articles in digital media has shown that the relationship of readers with texts can be somewhat more direct, that is, in readers' search for a reference, they do not need to come across information about the editing process that preceded and enabled the publication of the work. One possible effect of this one reader - one text relationship is also that there is no need to locate the article to be read within a set in an organization. The idea of unification that underpins the process of organizing an issue of a scientific periodical may thus face the prevalence of the unity and autonomy of each of the texts over the idea of organicity. The digital world has made us realize more firmly that the part can stand out or prevail over the whole.

But it is precisely when the part, the fragment, the heterogeneous, are in a prominent place that the organization of a set may prove much more productive. By imagining a reader not only in search of his or her most immediate interests, one also imagines a reader who can find, in the volume to be read, a collection in which questions are strengthened due to the very dialogue that one can glimpse between the texts approximated to compose the set. And this is even more interesting when one considers not only the multitude of theoretical and methodological perspectives that make up a field such as education, but also the quality of the discussions present in the productions published in a journal like Education and Research.

Therefore, we are pleased to present the third issue of volume 40 of our journal. It brings articles which offer a thought-provoking way of examining educational issues from perspectives that are intended to be distinct, innovative, because they question the established or sometimes stabilized theoretical and/or methodological development processes which underpin investigations in their respective areas. The guiding principles of the organization of this issue of Education and Research are thus the challenge of the benchmarks and the proposition of different perspectives for knowledge production in the educational field.

Accordingly, the collection opens with a set of four articles gathered around the challenge to the relationships established with knowledge. In the first of them, "Teaching and its relation to knowledge among Colombian university students", Miguel Ángel Gómez Mendoza and María Victoria Alzate Piedranhita present results of research that sought to understand which mechanisms may hinder the academic success of Colombian university students, in a context of mass access to higher education. By questioning how undergraduate students establish relationships with knowledge in general and academic knowledge in particular, the authors assume that students' academic difficulties should be attributed not to the shortcomings that they bring from their original social contexts, but to the specifics of university teaching and of the educational practices in academia. This assumption and the theoretical and methodological proposals underpinned by the notion of relationship with, developed by Bernard Charlot, support the accurate observation and the productive and revealing analysis of the relationships of undergraduates with the learning environment in the university.

The next text of this first set also brings questions about the relationship of undergraduates with knowledge, but, in this case, in the Brazilian context. In "The relationship of higher education students to knowledge: learnings and processes", Maria Gabriela Parenti Bicalho and Maria Celeste Reis Fernandes Souza also use Bernard Charlot's theoretical-methodological proposal to observe how students of a private community institution of higher education located in Minas Gerais state, in Brazil, relate to the knowledge presented to them in their academic journey. The authors observe the different ways in which the research subjects see university education and how they value this experience in relation not only to their prior education and to the cultural and social values they brought from primary and secondary school and from their families, but also to their present and future projects. Data analysis evidences the characteristics of the context examined, which decisively challenge the objectives proposed and achieved regarding professional education in institutions of higher education, when the perceptions of students about the modes of their professional transition in this training process are considered.

In "Case-Based Learning: a teaching proposal implemented in an undergraduate Physical Education program", Andreia Cristina Metzner examines the issue of curriculum organization centered on the notion of discipline and on the non-establishment of relationships between the curriculum units that make up courses in higher education. Therefore, teacher education faces the impossibility of developing a more organic curriculum, which in this sense is related to the difficulty of performing interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary educational processes. One prospect of resolution to the existing order would be to organize teaching around case-based learning. Research data were produced using this methodology, in an experiment in a Physical Education course in a higher education institution located in São Paulo state, in Brazil. Focusing on the training of students, other academic actions made up the experience developed in order to perform work which responds to the principles of inter- and transdisciplinarity which guided the research.

Written by Celina Hoffmann, Roselaine Ruviaro Zanini, Ângela Cristina Corrêa, Julio Cezar Mairesse Siluk, Vitor Francisco Schuch Júnior and Lucas Veiga Ávila, the article "Performance of Brazilian universities in view of the General Course Index (IGC)" closes this first set. This work also observes the relationship of subjects with academic knowledge, but in this case from the institutional perspective. In the face of critical discussions about the processes of evaluation of higher education institutions in Brazil, the authors present the problems historically pointed in such processes, and the questions about their epistemological foundations, evaluation guidelines and social consequences. After this discussion, they present a view divergent from that of the literature review and propose to consider the contributions that the analysis of the results of Índice Geral de Cursos (IGC - General Index of Courses) can provide for assessing higher education quality. These results are produced within Sistema Nacional de Avaliação da Educação Superior (SINAES - National System of Higher Education Assessment).

In the second set of articles of this issue of Education and Research, we have gathered work produced with the aim of reviewing what has historically been produced in the areas which they operate in. In "Contributions of the cultural-historical-based critical perspective to scientific production in educational psychology", Laísy de Lima, Simone Salviano Alves, Jaqueline Vilar Ramalho and Fabíola de Sousa Braz Aquino intend to map, in school and educational psychology, the productions with the cultural-historical approach of Vygotskian origin. Their goal is to recognize productivity in studies conducted from this theoretical approach to contribute to the research processes carried out from this perspective. More than that, the article offers an approach of the productions analyzed that positions them in the face of the historical development that made them possible. Therefore, it also provides the reader with a critical dimension to observe the development of a theoretical concept that, according to the authors, is associated with the commitment of scientific research to social and citizenship issues.

In the article "Performance and adaptation of poor children to school: the research pattern of CRPE-SP", Marcos Cezar de Freitas examines how a new pattern of research was created at Centro Regional de Pesquisas Educacionais de São Paulo (CRPE-SP - Sao Paulo Regional Center for Educational Research) from 1956 to 1963. The author analyses the theoretical and methodological affiliations of two of its leading researchers in the period, Dante Moreira Leite and Luiz Pereira, and the propositions which they develop to address the relations between the transformation of São Paulo city into a metropolis, due to the urbanization process of Brazil at that historic moment, along with the arrival of poor children at school. The new research pattern led to the possibility of seeing the poor academic performance of children from the outskirts not as a consequence of biological aspects, but of social issues, which evidenced the operation of an exclusion principle in the assessments of student performance. It was, therefore, a moment of decisive productivity for research in sociology of education, both in terms of the new theoretical and methodological possibilities and of the results of research.

In "Investigation on youth and adult education: the theses of a Latin American contest", Jaime Rogelio Calderón López-Velarde maps the distribution of research in Latin America and the Caribbean. To this end, the author discusses the very understanding that has historically been constructed of what Youth and Adult Education is and the consequences of the definitions proposed. The author, therefore, considers the progress made in this process of (re)definition, and indicates the challenges that arise from them. By addressing theoretically and methodologically the data, he contrasts the characteristics of the studies on Youth and Adult Education developed in different countries represented by the documents of the research corpus. The study thus provides not only a geographic and historical overview of the knowledge production in the area, but also of the various modes of institutional placement of Youth and Adult Education in the contexts observed.

The third set of articles focuses on the control of subjects and the effects of the forms of control on educational processes. The article "School success of girls from poor communities: what is the role of family socialization?", by Marília Pinto de Carvalho, Adriano Senkevics and Tatiana Avila Loges, presents the results of a qualitative study developed throughout 2011 with eight low-income families from São Paulo city, in Brazil. It aimed to investigate how differences in raising boys and girls, as seen by the subjects from the families participating in the study could be associated with the more or less satisfactory performance of girls and boys in school. The authors proposed to break with the dichotomous approaches found in earlier research on the same theme, so as not to relate closely the academic success of girls to the learning of subordination that they have socially and historically been subjected to. Before that, they sought to examine the responses of the data to the guiding research questions, and to treat these responses following the principle that gendered power relations have contradictory dimensions. Thus, the authors say: "with the purpose of not reiterating taken-for-granted assumptions, we sought to apprehend in our analysis the dimensions of both rupture and maintenance of the subordinate positions of women".

Equally thought-provoking is the article "The mortification of the flesh and the desire exposed: control over girls in Catholic institutions", by Carlos Manoel Pimenta Pires. Based on Foucault's work, the author analyzes the so-called Manual de piedade da donzela cristã (Manual of piety of the Christian maiden), a textbook used for the education of girls in boarding schools and convents in the second half of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century in Portugal. The author develops the hypothesis that, in the nineteenth century, the episteme and moral specific of women was formed, so as to center the feminine as a productive agent of morality for the society which was then organized in the Western world, and that many elements may still be found in contemporary times. The thesis is that ecclesial instruction played a crucial role in the development of this female subject, with which the Church also intended to offer a solution to the tension between family privacy and public interaction when sovereign societies began to make way for industrial societies.

This third set is closed by an article on the civilizing process, which is titled "Body education - social dance in 19th century Rio de Janeiro: Paranhos' point of view". With the analysis of chronicles published on Jornal do Commercio by José Maria da Silva Paranhos, a key player in the conformation of the Brazilian Empire, Victor Andrade de Melo examines the importance of balls and dance societies, not only for the social, political and cultural life of Rio de Janeiro at the time, but also for the very education of the subjects raised in this society, which sought a process to promote civility. In his writings, Paranhos presented projects for Brazil, and the treatment of issues related to the balls and the dances was one of his means for representing what one would wish for a non-backward nation and for the evidence of an elite in contrast to the uneducated people. The dances of the elite and the dances of the people marked the place of separation between these two social classes. For the elite, the balls and the dances meant the possibility of polishing manners, according to Paranhos, in order to enable the interaction not of the elite and the people, but of the different subjects that composed this privileged class.

In the last group of articles in this issue of Education and Research, there are works which have a common goal: dialoguing with the work of thinkers, directly or indirectly related to the educational field, in order to produce discussions and insight for educational processes. Accordingly, in "Autonomy, cooperativeness and self-management in Freinet: foundations of an international solidarity", Antonio Takao Kanamaru proposes to observe a little considered aspect of educators' work: "the radical solidarity in their means and their ends". The hypothesis put forward is that cooperativism and self-management would be the key points of Freinet's propositions, because they are associated with an international solidarity pedagogy. This hypothesis is grounded in the observation of another little explored feature of this author's work: the presence of a heterodox interpretation of Marxism, of the alienation of the producer, the material relations of production, and Marx's internationalist doctrine. On these foundations, Freinet's pedagogy becomes even more relevant nowadays, because it opposes the constraints which education policies of competitive and technocratic nature, associated with marketing and financial objectives, impose on educational freedom.

"Progressive education today: the legacy of John Dewey", by Maria Luísa Frazão Rodrigues Branco, also contrasts the pedagogical proposals of progressive education and the impediments to the freedom currently imposed by neoliberal education policies. To meet her study's goal, the author revisits John Dewey's work, seeking to point out the core concepts of his educational thought, and then observes how such knowledge was understood and developed by the researchers who proposed to continue the author's work. As in the article presented above, this also provides the characterization of the political positions underlying not only the pedagogical proposal under review, but also the ways social subjects are seen, that is, constituted in an educational process grounded in the ideas advocated in this conception of teaching, learning and democratic coexistence within the school.

In "The human condition and the virtuous education of the will: the depths of recognition in Honneth and Rousseau", Claudio Almir Dalbosco proposes that Rousseau should be attributed not only the role of founder of reflexive freedom but also that of social freedom. To this end, he discusses in what sense it is possible to recognize in Rousseau's considerations that underpin the theory of recognition how the education of self-love "can only be properly understood as the theory of the virtuous education of the will". According to the author, respect for others is sustained in mutual recognition, which opposes the desire for social recognition founded on self-love and on competition with others, in constant search for a place of superiority. Thus, student education for social equality should start in early childhood, in order to ensure that the educational process leads to mutual respect between equals and, therefore, to social freedom. The contemporary educational proposals that are limited to the treatment of learning processes, dangerously minimizing "large and complex educational issues", prove to be reductive.

The last set of articles is closed by the work "Experience and language in Walter Benjamin", by Eloiza Gurgel Pires. The author addresses the function that language has in Benjamin's thought, i.e., the function of translating, of transmuting the world, which is "the movement itself that constitutes knowledge". Education, conducted ontogenetically in the subject, and grounded in the mimetic character of language, underpins this movement. Abstract, rational thought has historically opposed such concept of education. "From that experimentum linguae, one discloses the mythical and poetic reflections as well as the sense of the sacred often concealed in the most mundane everyday activities". Thus, Benjamin's work opposes any educational project, any institutionalization of knowledge, because these would be obstacles to the full and concrete experience of knowledge.

This volume is closed by the interview titled "Ecological rationality and citizenship training" ,conducted by Danilo R. Streck with Gerd Gigerenzer, a researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Development, in Berlin. In the interview, the German researcher criticizes the validation of the modes of knowledge production when only based on logic. He therefore considers the need to recognize the legitimacy of the knowledge produced on the basis of intuitive processes. His point of view is justified by the very impossibility of totalizing knowledge about the reality examined. In a world of uncertainty, like the present one, ecological rationality would underpin the production of knowledge in context, i.e., according to the social and cultural specificities that arise to the researcher, which demand creative and autonomous decision-making, given the unheard-of, the unusual, the non-customary, what eludes generalizations based on the rationality of scientific logic.

Therefore, in this issue of Education and Research, we have articles that present critical perspectives, challenging points of view, which promote reflection and movement of positions in contemporary debates in the educational field. We have gathered texts not only from diverse areas of research in education, but also from diverse institutional affiliations and regional origins, which responds representatively to the complexity of the field. Part of the articles has been translated into English, with the aim of contributing to expand the access modes to the journal and to form an increasingly comprehensive reader community.

We hope this issue of Education and Research contributes to the development of scientific research on educational processes, to the continuous critical review of the modes of knowledge production in the area, and to the necessary challenge to the knowledge already produced.

Émerson de Pietri

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  12 Sept 2014
• Date of issue
  Sept 2014