This issue of Educação e Pesquisa opens with five articles by Brazilian and Argentinean authors about private schooling and its tense relations with public education in both countries. These texts result from an academic agreement between Brazil and Argentina for the research project named “Estudios sobre la configuración de la educación pública y privada en Argentina y Brasil” (Studies of the configuration of public and private education in Argentina and Brazil), coordinated by Sandra Ziegler and conducted in cooperation between Programa Educación, Conocimiento y Sociedad (Program on education, knowledge, and society) from FLACSO Argentina, the Department of Sciences of Education at the National University of Cordoba and Graduate Program for Cultural Studies at EACH/USP. The articles gathered here under the care of Graziela Serroni Perosa represent part of the debates taking place in two international study meetings, attended by the researchers involved in the project. Despite the great importance of the subject, private schooling is insufficiently researched by the sociology of education in both countries and the texts in this issue are meant to be a crucial contribution to understand its dynamics, how it is seen as part of the urban ambience and in the social fabric, as well as its internal segmentation and its role in the making and in the maintaining of social inequalities.
The article “A educação privada na Argentina e no Brasil” (Private education in Argentina and Brazil), by Ana Maria F. Almeida, Manuel Alejandro Giovine, Maria Teresa G. Alves, and Sandra Ziegler, runs across – in a broad array – the organization of the school systems in both countries, since the 19th century. The expansion of the systems is intertwined with processes of differentiation of the school offering, which add elements that produce and reproduce educational inequalities. Although with different temporalities in each country, both in Brazil and in Argentina such segmentation processes have been supported by the social divide between public and private education.
Next, Sebastián Fuentes analyzes the higher-education choices by youths from middle-high and upper sections of Buenos Aires, joining urban segregation to educative segregation. His paper “Elegir la universidad privada en Buenos Aires: espacialización de la elección en contextos de diversificación” (Choosing a Private University in Buenos Aires: choice spatialization in diversified contexts) has a fresh approach to the socio-anthropological research on higher education, which allows him to indicate the significance and the power relations involved in the processes of privatization of education.
The reasons that lead adults in charge of children to choose a certain group of private schools are the core point of “La educación privada y las experiencias formativas de la clase alta en la Argentina” (Private education and upper-class educational experiences in Argentina). In it, Victoria Gessaghi, searches for the ways the bond between Argentinean upper class and a circuit of Catholic schools was historically formed as such schools do not have a high academic performance but rather they ensure some sociability among peers within those privileged social sectors.
Another segment of private schools is the scope of two articles that finish up this section, both focusing on Brazil. “A opção da escola privada em famílias dos grupos populares” (The choice of private schools in families from low-income groups), by Graziela Serroni Perosa and Adriana Santiago Rosa Dantas, considers the arrival of private schools in district in the East area of São Paulo. Aware of the spatial dimensions of school and social segregation, the authors reveal that, beyond the prestigious private schools in wealthy neighborhoods of the metropolis, known for their selectiveness, there is a myriad of small private schools in less affluent neighborhoods. These are intitutions aimed at serving the upper fractions of the working classes.
Finally, Ana Rita Siqueira and Maria Alice de Lima Gomes Nogueira show how the recent improvement of economic conditions among Brazilian grass-roots sectors had the effect of expanding the enrolment in private schools, a phenomenon that the authors observe in the city of Contagem, Minas Gerais. In the article “Focalizando um segmento específico da rede privada de ensino: escolas particulares de baixo custo” (Focusing on a specific segment of the private education system: low-cost private schools), analysis focuses on two schools whose tuition fees are low, and the purpose is to contribute to uncover the characteristics of this segment in the private school system.
From the collection of the other articles included in this issue of Educação e Pesquisa, one may say that they mirror the vitality and diversification of the educational research produced in Portuguese and Spanish. In addition to the valuable contribution by Alain Coulon, from France, we publish nine texts that were written by both male and female authors from different Brazilian states and three articles from Spain, Colombia, and Argentina. The diversity of topics, approaches and frameworks expresses well the editorial policy that guides the work of Educação e Pesquisa, a journal that is open to all and any significant input to knowledge of and research on education, regardless of their theoretical and/or methodological positioning.
Two of these studies deal with philosophical issues: “Os ideais da formação humanista e o sentido da experiência escolar” (The ideals of a humanistic education (bildung) and the meaning of school experience) and “A importância da discussão sobre a noção de sujeito: Foucault, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty” (The importance of the discussion about the notion of subject: Foucault, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty). In the former, José Sérgio Fonseca de Carvalho starts with some perception – rather disseminated – that schooling is facing a deep crisis in the contemporary world. He mentions the fading of the political and existential meaning of the school as a crucial but not always perceived dimension of such crisis. He then seeks to resume, with Arendt and Koselleck, the school experience as an initiation by the young into symbolic heritages capable of providing human experience with intelligibility and durability to a shared world.
Instead, Reinaldo Furlan in his article “A importância da discussão sobre a noção de sujeito: Foucault, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty”, highlights the central role played by the notion of subject in the field of education. He puts it always side by side with the notion of activity, with the purpose of introducing variations in the idea of subjectivation, amidst a broad and intricate context in which the subject´s activity cannot be separated from his passivity and his/her relations with the others.
Next, Juvenal Zanchetta Junior, author of “O difícil diálogo entre escola e mídia” (The difficult dialogue between secondary school and the media in Brazil), thinks over the estrangement between these spheres, as he observes how the school has dealt with media vehicles and texts in the trajectory of secondary education since the 1930´s until today.
In turn, Daniel Ríos Muñoz and David Herrera Araya in a controversial essay named “Los desafíos de la evaluación por competencias en el ámbito educativo” (The challenges of competence-based assessment in the educational field), take a stance for the formative role of the evaluation by competences. They see it as a practice that may positively affect both learning and teaching.
A documental investigation supports the reflections by Joana Brás Varanda Marques and Denise de Freitas on “Fatores de caracterização da educação não formal” (Characterization factors of non-formal education: a literature review). Upon reviewing the literature, the authors show that non-formal education is a sector of knowledge in which the terms used are polysemic and get along with different definitions. Yet, they found a group of words more frequently adopted, which utilizes factors associated mainly to structural features such as location, degree of planning, or length of learning.
The article “Diploma para quê? A educação superior e os praças da Polícia Militar de Minas Gerais” (A degree for what? Higher education and low rank Minas Gerais’ Military Police officers), by Vicente Riccio, adresses an original and insufficiently researched topic: the role of higher education among low-rank police officers. Starting with interviews, the author finds that “praças” (low-rank policemen) consider such schooling provides them with greater capacity of de discernment, but it also increases the conflicts with upper ranks. Besides, as their investment in education proves to be of little worth, such police officers tend to quit their career.
Also an original and quite timely contribution comes from the study by Pablo Ángel Meira Cartea, María Barba Núñez, and Juan José Lorenzo Castiñeiras, “Crisis económica y profesionalización en el campo de la educación ambiental: comparativa 2007-2013 en Galicia” (Economic crisis and professionalization in the field of environmental: comparing 2007-2013 in Galicia). The authors seek to understand how the social and economic crisis in Spain affects environmental education and their conclusions have certainly much to say to Brazilians: they see a dismantling in the field of environmental education, in the context where the incipient welfare state is degraded, as public services and resources are continually undermined.
The article “O currículo de história na reforma da Secretaria Municipal de Educação do Rio de Janeiro” (History curriculum in the reform of Rio de Janeiro Municipal Department of Education) innovates in its methodology. Authors Caroline da Luz Moraes and Luisa Kaufman Spindola compare two studies about the changes occurring in the history curriculum in Rio de Janeiro city education system, between 2009 and 2013; the former focusing on the makers of the new pedagogical materials and the latter on the teachers who worked in the classroom. Such comparison allows to see clearly the cycle of this curricular reform policy which, by circulating in the contexts being studied, was not simply received and assimilated but modified by the relevant agents, who yielded different meanings.
Experiences in activities involving research, teaching and academic extension in the project Escrileituras: um modo de ler-escrever em meio à vida (Write-reading: a ways of Reading and writing amidst life) and the data collection conducted by instruments especially designed to allow the reading of its concreteness are analyzed in “Processos tradutórios na pesquisa em educação: o Projeto Escrileituras” (Translating processes in research in Education: Writing-Reading Project), by Máximo Daniel Lamela Adó, Sandra Mara Corazza, and Maria Idalina Krause de Campos.
In another direction, the opinions of teachers about the use of computers in admission tests to enter higher education in Spain are the core of the article “Actitudes docentes hacia los ejercicios de la Prueba de Acceso a la Universidad informatizada” (Teachers’ attitudes toward exercise typologies in the computer-based university entrance examination), authored by Ana Sevilla-Pavón, Ana Gimeno-Sanz, and Jesús García-Laborda.
From Colombia, comes the reflection of the ideas of teachers in the article “Percepción y conocimiento de los docentes universitarios sobre los procesos investigativos universitarios: estudio de caso” (Perception and knowledge of the university professors about university research: a case study). Authors Alejandro Valencia-Arias, Daniela Morales-Zapata, Laura Vanegas-Rendón, and Martha Luz Benjumea-Arias, investigated the teacher perceptions about the production of knowledge in the university.
Still in the field of knowledge construction taking place in the universities, Amélia Artes and Jesús Mena-Chalco present a detailed survey of the production involving racial relations in Brazil. In the article “Expansão da temática relações raciais no banco de dados de teses e dissertações da Capes” (Expansion of racial relations as a topic in Capes database of theses and dissertations), the authors analyze the evolution of the studies on race taking as a source of data graduate theses and dissertations with a record in the Capes´ collection of academic productions intented for achieving a graduate degree over the last 25 years. They point out an increasing interest in the topic.
This issue finishes with the article “O ofício de estudante: a entrada na vida universitária” (The student’s craft: The entrance to university life) by Alain Coulon, professor at University of Paris 8, followed by an interview with the author. Heir to an abundant sociological tradition in France, Alain Coulon has his name associated with the development of ethno-methodology and its use in educational research, as well as the topic of the university and its students. Interested in understanding the process that led the French higher-education system to be more open and wider in the 1980´s, Coulon devoted himself to the investigation of the academic experience by the recent and heterogeneous public that now has access to it. He innovates in methodologies and analytical categories. It is no coincidence that the current context, by expanding the enrolment and affirmative policies for higher education in Brazil, renewed the interest for his Works, here represented by an original article in which he draws parallels between the growth of access in France and in Brazil and comments on the challenges of aiding new college pupils to learn the student´s trade. In the interview given to Marilia Pontes Sposito, Belmira Oliveira Bueno, and Ana Maria Freitas Teixeira, the reader will have the opportunity to be in touch with Coulon´s abundant trajectory of teaching and research as well as with the collection of the reflections he developed in his vast work.
It should also be emphasized that six of the texts included in this issue are also available in English and in French. Thus we hope we have contributed to make the foreign readers to get to know more and more the quality of the academic production in the Latin American educational field.
Marília Pinto de Carvalho
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Oct-Dec 2017
