Educação de jovens e adultos: a prática docente em Escola Pública Municipal de Maracanaú, Ceará

Abstract

This work has as its central theme the practice of teachers of the Youth and Adult Education (YAE). The YAE has expanded institutionally all over the country. However, despite such expansion, what we can see is the fragility of these professionals’ daily practice, who work without a background of consistent knowledge in the field of YAE. Considering that education can help to form citizens, and that human development is a matter of opportunity, we question the practice of such teachers, the YAE and the possibilities to offer a high quality education. Thus, the present study investigated the teaching practice in a public school in order to verify whether the knowledge revealed by the students of YAE are taken into consideration in this practice. This research is characterized as explanatory, descriptive and qualitative methodology with the design of a case study. The Municipal School of Early Childhood and Elementary Education called “Deputy José Martins Rodrigues” worked as a research unit. As methodological tools, we use the participant observation, semi-structured interviews and the analysis of the political pedagogical project of the school previously mentioned and the activities developed along in the YAE. In order to register our findings, we made use of a field journal, a digital recorder and a camera. The research subjects were the teachers who work in YAE I and II, and also the pedagogical coordinator and the Municipal Coordinator of YAE. The theoretical and methodological grounds in which this research has been done is focused on the principles of Liberating Education by Freire (1996, 1994, 2000) which dialogue with academics such as Brandão (1986, 1996, 2006), Di Pierro and Haddad (2001), Arroyo (2007), Carvalho (2006), Furtado (2009), Smith (2007), Charlot (2013), Franco (2005), Braga (2012), Pinto (2007), Beisiegel (2004). The survey results show that YAE teachers generally end up following the same guidelines and curricular perspectives that led us to the current models of curriculum in other regular forms of education itself. We understand that what is prioritized in the teaching of YAE is still the content and not the way to deal with them. Besides, there is more than ever the need for a teacher training that enables the pedagogical practices to follow the diversity of knowledge and experience brought by the students of YAE modality.