In Brazil, the year 2015 ended under the impact of a powerful movement of secondary students, who, in an unprecedented manner in the country, occupied their schools to fight reforms imposed by state governments, first in Sao Paulo and then in Goiás. Defined in the offices without public debate, and guided by the logic of economic rationalization, these reforms met students’ creative opposition force, to the surprise of rulers, administrators and economists. In the day-to-day of the occupations, students cooked, cleaned, painted, and took care of their schools. But they also reinvented school education by promoting activities, workshops, debates, and conversation circles on topics of their interest, and by constructing numerous forms of expression, which ranged from diaries to musical composition, from videos, posters, and murals to plays, drawings and graffiti. With this, more than occupying school buildings, students occupied the imaginary of social movements and particularly of educators, rekindling hopes. The issues raised by this movement to political life and public education in Brazil will undoubtedly still take time to be properly debated.
However, it can be said that the material we highlight in this first issue ofEducation and Reserach in 2016 dialogues with the main themes that surfaced in the struggle of secondary students. It is the reprint of the article “Ideology and education”, by Marilena Chaui, originally published inEducação e Sociedade, in 1980, which is accompanied here by a careful presentation and an interview given by Professor Chaui to Homero Silveira Santiago and Paulo Henrique Fernandes Silveira in 2015. In the interview, among other topics of great interest, Chaui recalls her work as a philosophy teacher at Colégio Estadual Alberto Levy [a state public school], in São Paulo city, and discusses the struggle for democracy and the right to education. Also, in the 1980 text which we now republish, there are reflections whose timeliness sheds light on the recent occupations of schools in a striking manner.
Chaui states that, based on the logic of dissimulation, ideology’s fundamental operation is to “move from the discourse by to thediscourse about”, silencing those who live the experiences. Now, one of the most powerful and surprising aspects of the secondary school movement in 2015 was that it took exactly the opposite way, by contrasting a discourse by the youth and what is said about the youth by educators, governments, psychologists, intellectuals, and many others, who insist on stating what the youth is and what it should be.
The discourse of students, guided by freedom and autonomy, was organized from the break with what Chaui calls “the competence rule” according to which “not anyone can tell anyone else anything anywhere and under any circumstance”. They were “immature” youth (immature is another term contested by Chaui), who said to adults what their proposals and claims were, in the yards, courts, classrooms, social networks, on the streets, and in the media. And they did so under circumstances defined by them – for example, by transforming what they called a “press conference” into a spoken choir of many voices and faces; or by occupying avenues with “classes in the street”.
In the text that Chaui wrote so long ago, even the core of the movement is well characterized: the fight against reforms of the education system guided by a logic of efficiency and resource savings, and defined behind closed doors by economists hired by governments. She criticizes a “rationality” that was applied to education already at that time and that “consists simply of separating radically those who decide or rule and those who perform or are ruled, removing from the latter any and all power over their own activity.”
The same timeliness could be highlighted in many other parts of the article, in which it discusses what being a teacher is, the internalization of evaluation rules, the reduction of students to consumers of culture, which, in turn, is reduced to a “binary and purely denotative conception of signs” (no, Chaui did not mean the Internet and social networks, and their GIFs, memes and likes; she talked about the audiovisual resources available at the time, i. e., slides, cassettes, videos). But we invite readers to take pleasure in finding such rich parallels which help us respond to the current challenges of education, including those posed by the explosion of civility and autonomy which emerged with schools occupations. Because, according to Chaui, students, just like social classes “are a happening, a doing themselves, action and reaction, conflict and struggle, a movement of self-discovery and self-definition by their own act in the course of which classes, as much as students, constitute themselves knowing themselves.”
In addition to this rich material, this first issue of Education and Research in 2016 also brings fifteen original articles, which, in their thematic and methodological diversity, represent well the production of knowledge in the educational field. These articles have been written by authors from not only south, southeast and center-west Brazil, but also from Chile and Portugal; and address topics ranging from theoretical and methodological reflection to teacher education, from the management of graduate schools to children’s experience in early childhood education.
The first three texts provide the reader with theoretical and methodological debates. In “Research in education, social movements, and coloniality: continuing a debate”, Edla Eggert dialogues with another article on the subject, authored by Danilo Streck and Telmo Adams, published by Education and Research in 2012. The author provocatively seeks to reflect on unique ways of knowledge from the perspective of Latin American education, problematizing copy and anthropophagy or recreation. Renzo Taddei and Ana Laura Gamboggi propose a relationship between anthropology and education that is not asymmetric. In the article “Education, anthropology, ontologies”, the authors highlight the paradox in the relationship between the professional education of anthropologists as an epistemological exercise and the ontological dimension of the ethnographic experience. Closing this block of more theoretical texts, the article “Methodological contributions for the analysis of meanings in a study on teaching”, by Vanessa Cristina da Silva and Claudia Leme Ferreira Davis, presents the contribution – in qualitative studies on the construction of the meanings of work among teachers – of innovative procedures, such as awareness resources, to expand the interpretive scope of analysis.
The construction of meanings for teaching work reappears in the following articles, under different approaches, with greater or lesser emphasis. Jaqueline Kalmus and Marilene Proença Rebello de Souza, in the text entitled “Work and education: a comparative analysis of education policies for in-service teachers in Brazil and Mexico”, compare continuing teacher education policies in force in the two countries. The authors show that these policies may result in one more element of work overload, but that, nonetheless, teachers often create unforeseen forms of appropriation of these courses, building new meanings for teaching work.
In “Adult educators: dilemmas and professional practices in the area of mathematics”, Maria Cecilia Fantinato and Darlinda Moreira analyze the teaching of mathematics in Centros Novas Oportunidades [New Opportunities Centres], which offer adult education in Portugal. Research results indicate innovative professional attitudes and practices, related to the search for new methodologies for teaching and for learning validation, with educators developing an understanding of the meaning of being a teacher in a broader way and based on the reality of adult education.
The teaching of mathematics is the focus of another article, authored by Luciane de Fatima Bertini and Cármen Lúcia Brancaglion Passos. “The role of virtual tutors in distance education for primary teachers: focusing on mathematics” presents research on how issues related to the teaching of mathematics were conducted by virtual tutors in a teacher education course for teachers of the early years of primary education, which was taught in distance mode in a Brazilian public university. It concludes that many of the practices of the virtual tutors observed can be considered similar to those of teachers.
The use of distance education in teacher education is also discussed in the article “Distance education from the students’ perspective”, by Simone de Souza, Valdeni Soliani Franco, and Maria Luisa Furlan Costa. The authors interviewed undergraduate students of education and physics, in order to understand their discourses about their personal experiences in undergraduate school, in distance mode, in the structural, organizational and educational fields.
The students’ point of view is also the focus of two other articles which deal with students of different ages. “Project Fénix – What do students think about the factors that promote their learning?” addresses the perception of two groups of students aged around 13 years about the factors which influence their learning. The authors, José Matias Alves and Ilídia Cabral, interviewed 39 students with different academic performance, involved in a project of learning improvement in Portuguese public schools.
Sandro Vinicius Sales dos Santos and Isabel de Oliveira e Silva focused on young children in the article “Children in early childhood education: school as a place of social experience”. Based on qualitative research, the article presents an interpretive reading of such experiences, expressed through both verbal language and what appears in the bodies of boys and girls. The authors indicate that, when living experiences in the institution, children link them to other experiences of their lives, and give them the character of continuity.
Then, the article “The academic management of lato sensu graduate education: The role of the coordinator for the quality of the courses” discusses the responsibilities of coordinators and managers for ensuring the quality of the courses, in a context of higher education funding contraction in the 1990s, and the consequent increase in the presence of private institutions and the proliferation of lato sensu graduate courses. The authors, Marília Fonseca and Dirce Mendes Fonseca, warn that such context, coupled with the lack of regulations for the offer, carries risks for the quality of these courses.
Ermelinda M. Pataca and Cristiane Borges de Oliveira present a teaching proposal based on the philosophical Portuguese journeys to Brazil in the eighteenth century. The article “Writing of biographical micro-narratives of Luso-Brazilian travelers: connections between the History of Science in Brazil and teaching” shows how the writing of these biographies and their dissemination in virtual spaces can contribute to illuminate the science developed in Brazil during the colonial period, in their collective character, away from great discoveries and individual geniuses, providing a more comprehensive understanding of scientific activity.
The following two articles address different dimensions of bullying, a phenomenon not always studied with seriousness and due care, and very present today in common sense and in the media. In “School bullying: a multifaceted phenomenon”, Marcela Almeida Zequinão, Pâmella Medeiros, Beatriz Pereira, and Fernando Luiz Cardoso disclose the results of a quantitative study conducted with 409 children and adolescents of two public schools in Florianopolis metropolitan area, in Santa Catarina state, aged 8 to 16 years. They indicate the that strengthening of the relations between the school and students, as well as a better preparation of teachers and staff can minimize the negative effects of school bullying.
In turn, “Emotions in cyberbullying – A study with Portuguese teenagers” brings the partial results of a study with 3,525 adolescents in Portugal. The authors Ana Paula Caetano, Isabel Freire, Ana Margarida Veiga Simão, Maria José D. Martins, and Maria Teresa Pessoa present reflections on how to act in preventing cyberbullying, and emphasize the need for the emotional education of the youth.
The section of original articles is closed by two texts from Chile about the schooling process of the Mapuche people, one of the most important original peoples of South America. “The monocultural school in Araucanía, 1883-1910: Power devices and Mapuche society”, by Juan Mansilla Sepúlveda, Daniel Llancavil Llancavil, Manuel Mieres Chacaltana, and Elizabeth Montanares Vargas, presents a documentary analysis aimed at understanding the dynamics of school in a disciplinary diagram of power-knowledge that was articulated from the capital of the country with the aim of integrating the Mapuche into the nation-state project of oligarchic groups in Chile. Last, Omar Turra and Donatila Ferrada, in the article “Teacher education in indigenous language and culture: A historical educational demand in Mapuche context”, highlight the need for teachers to be provided with education in Mapuche language and culture so that they can develop educational processes with cultural relevance.
Finally, in a year full of challenges to the Brazilian society, which are undoubtedly also challenges to educators, as well as to those seeking to build knowledge on education, we bring our contribution to a questioning attitude, based on dialogue and multiplicity of opinions.
Marília Pinto de Carvalho
Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil.
Contato: mariliac@usp.br
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jan-Mar 2016
