Por uma outra cultura avaliativa: a avaliação escolar nos anos iniciais do ensino fundamental em um laboratório de docências

Abstract

This research aims to identify and analyze how the teacher-researchers of the early years of Elementary Education position themselves regarding school assessment and what meanings they attribute to it. The empirical material was produced through formative research in a Laboratory of Contemporary Teaching Practices (LABDOC), which is consolidated as a spacetime for (re)training teachers in Basic and Higher Education. The analytical exercise is based on the narratives produced in LABDOC, involving experiments and experiences among the teacher-researchers from schools and university researchers, articulated with official documents and the political-pedagogical projects of the schools in which they work. The theoretical framework, from a post-structuralist perspective, involves studies on teacher education, contemporary teaching practices, and specifically, assessment. In the field of assessment, authors such as Rejane Ramos Klein, Domingos Fernandes, Jorge Pinto, Maria Teresa Esteban, and Luiz Carlos de Freitas have contributed to the critical discussion of the topic. The formative research developed enables an understanding that pedagogical assessment practices are shaped by regimes of truth and the prevailing culture of assessment, which permeate public policies, regulations, teachers’ formative experiences, and consequently, their teaching practices. In this study, the imperative of assessment within a neoliberal rationality is identified as the dominant regime of truth that sustains and produces new ways of being a teacher and a student in contemporary times, impacting teaching work. This makes it possible to show that assessment, in the teaching practices of the participating teacher-researchers, is presented as continuous, permanent, and "focused on learning." As a result of this study, it was possible to create arguments that inspire everyday attitudes, which may act as fissures or breaches in the contemporary culture of assessment driven by neoliberal rationality. It is proposed that, through small acts of resistance to the prevailing logic expressed in assessment, it may be possible to develop a more ethical and fair evaluation within everyday teaching practices and the educational process. In summary, the study advocates for a different culture of assessment, in which school evaluation assumes its ethical dimension as a constitutive part of the educational process rather than merely serving the purpose of qualification. It calls for an assessment that is less individualizing and performative – an assessment that is truly educational.