O currículo e a cultura escolar como espaço de poder: praticando estudos culturais numa escola pública

Abstract

Our study approaches the curriculum in the perspective of the school culture. Its objective was the quarrelsome relations experienced in the curricular space by the subjects involved in the educational process. Its purpose was to investigate, under the light of the contemporary curricular theories, in the curricular territory of a public school, the routine practices of the dominated youthful groups, its relations with the dominant official culture and the power relations that are established in the encounter of pedagogical nature. Therefore, substantiated in the cultural analysis, we seek to analyze and clearify the incessant construction and reconstruction of the real curriculum and to know its practices and meanings. In that sense, we opted for a qualitative methodological approach, defyning it as a case study of ethnographic nature. We used participant observation as an instrument of data collection, a field journal, semi-structured interviews and focal groups. The subjects were constituted of students, professors and managers of a public school in the city of Fortaleza, Brasil, with emphasis in the students. The research reveals that the state-owned school is a creating and socializing agency that grants primacy to the curriculum of the dominant culture and to its desire of colonization of the popular culture, showing its toes with the bourgeois capitalist State. The context observed uncovers a movement of control and of discipline of the student body, entangled by the official culture of the school seeking to assure the status quo and the forms of domination of the modern society. For such, it elaborates a discipline apparatus that cultivates the production of docile minds and bodies among the students. The school, as a modern treaty, utilizes the uniform, a stardandization system of classes, schedules, average grade, among other strategies, as a modern technology of uniformization and standardization of behaviors, practices and world views. Others meanings and values associated to the uniform are revealed. The research poits out that, despite the effort of the school to homogenize the students, the cultural dynamic of the curricular space sets out a setting marked by diversity and difference, typical of the globalized contemporary society. It shows a story line of mapping and uneven occupation of the school physical spaces, where the groups, according to their closeness or separation of the dominant official culture in the curriculum, occupy the more central spaces or move away to the periphery. Some groups of the cultural setting of the school, even start to defend the interests and the needs of the dominant official culture, in function of the symbolic profits that are attributed to the their adherents. The research shows, on the other hand, that the curriculum and the culture of the school researched are not characterized only by the game of domination and submission; the school routine is marked by a series of disparate and quarrelsome events, that can be read as having a strong sense directed to the desire to clash with the dominant official perspective in the school and in the curriculum Thus, it has the intension marked by the impetus of resistance and of clashing of the official order. For this reason, resistance and non-submission, also, marks of the school culture, predominant characteristics in some groups of the cultural setting of the school and of the curriculum, collaborating, thus, for the development and maintenance of a contentious capital, that starts to integrate the intersubjective relations of the diverse groups that compose the curricular territory. The comprehension of the phenomena studied stirs up the need for new political, cultural, and educational projects that are more committed with autonomy and freedom, offering inclusive experiences and marked by the horizon of diversity, happiness and full achievement of the people.