A Criança Na Escola: Os Sentidos da Escolarização Para Alunos Tidos Como Problemáticos

Abstract

This is a qualitative ethnographic research. In order to understand the meanings of schooling for problematic students who are classified this way in this research for creating disciplinary problems at school or because they have a small interest in participating in school activities, I had as the main objective of this research to perceive the impressions those children have of a school as well as of some school practices and the knowledge transmitted by them. More specifically, I wanted to investigate: 1) What are the school roles for a child when it comes to practices and knowledge, 2) What do they like and dislike among those practices that they live and the knowledge that is passed to them, 3) How, in different contexts, children interpret and appropriate the practices, the spaces and the knowledge of the school 4) What to expect from a school and the schooling process. For that, I used the following methodological tools: observation, interviews and requested activities with the children [photographs (where the children enrolled school spaces to give them directions related to school practice) and an imaginary story (which from a story created by me, the students were able to expose the role of the school in a playful way)]. The empirical field chosen to guide this research was the Municipal School Ensinando e Apredendo, located in Novo Mondubim, a neighborhood of Fortaleza. The privileged individuals were six students in a class considered, by administrators and teachers, as the "most problematic" in terms of disciplinary behavior during the academic years of 2007 and 2008. The results show that the meanings of schooling for these children are not directly related to what the school proposes which is the transmission of knowledge. For these students, the most meaningful idea of being in a school is to be among friends and have fun with them upon the opportunity. Contact with school knowledge becomes important to them only if it comes in a playful way, otherwise is described by students as a practice that should take a short period of time which importance they do not know. With this study we may conclude that the new values that children and young people build in social spaces in which they are immersed, leads them to deny the school knowledge and make them want a school with no schooling. It is also conclusive that students do not consider themselves as problematic, they question the normality of the structure which makes they feel uncomfortable and they do it as from the contexts and their established relationships inside the field. In this field, these new relationships can bring new identities for these children and these are no longer seen as problematic but turned into an instance of normality granted by the school