Entre discursos e retóricas: um estudo sobre o reconhecimento e as estratégias de enfrentamento do fracasso escolar em um município da região metropolitana de São Paulo / Between Discourses and Rhetorics: a study on the recognition of and strategies do deal with, school failure in a municipality of the metropolitan area of São Paulo

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2010

RESUMO

This work deals with the problem of school failure, an issue that remains on the agenda of Public Policies in Education and has received special attention within educational research since the 1980s. In the present context the phenomenon of non-learning in pupils from the more impoverished social strata has acquired public status, and unacceptable proportions, demanding actions of public policies targeted at its effective solution. This study takes, therefore, as its point of departure the need to understand the forms of recognition of this phenomenon, and the ensuing policies to deal with it within the sphere of public and municipal school systems. It chooses as its object of study the forms of recognition of school failure, as well as the proposals to deal with it put forward by teaching supervisors and in documents prepared by the Municipal Secretariat of Education (SME) of a town belonging to the metropolitan area of the city of São Paulo. In addition to a survey of the literature on the subject, the work included an empirical study inspired in the ethnographic perspective, whose fieldwork was based on participant observations and informal interviews with school supervisors from that Secretariat of Education assigned as responsible for the creation and implementation of proposals to improve the quality of municipal teaching. The work also comprised the analysis of official documents issued by the Secretariat (Municipal Education Plans, Laws, Curriculum Guidelines, amongst others), as well as extra-official documents, such as publications directed specifically at teachers in the format of a periodical and news published at the institution website. In terms of theoretical background, the study is aligned with researches conducted in the context of Critical School Psychology and Critical-Historical Pedagogy. The concepts of ideology and of competent discourse, as expressed by Marilena Chauí, were adopted as central to the analysis of the propositions put forward by the SME. This analysis revealed the permanence of individualizing explanations for school failure, in which the responsibility for non-learning is placed either on pupils and their families, or on the teachers. Similarly, the study uncovered in SMEs official discourse a process of negation of school failure through a rhetoric of quality and a recognition of failure only internally to it. Lastly, forms of facing the phenomenon of failure already recognized and described in the academic literature were found. The analysis showed the presence of discourses about school failure still in their classic forms: individualizing assumptions regarding pupils and teachers, and their culpability for school failure; adoption of clientele-based, assistentialist principles in the conduction of educational public policies. Nevertheless, signs of a refusal to the way of thinking impinged by official statements, as expressed by teaching supervisors, open the possibility of an effective recognition of, and struggle against school failure. The existent contradictions between the way of thinking expressed in Education Public Policies and that of the agents of their implementation are potentially innovative, and may contribute to significant progress in conceptions about the school and quality of Education.

ASSUNTO(S)

school failure fracasso escolar educational policy etnografia teacher education formação de professores ethnography política educacional

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