A educação dos surdos no RS: currículos de formação de professores de surdos

Abstract

This research aimed at analyzing knowledges about the deaf that were spread in curricula of courses offered from 1984 to 2004 to teachers that work with deaf students in Rio Grande do Sul. The material analyzed was composed of two curricula of under-graduation courses and three of habilitation courses. The research was grounded on both post-structuralist studies and Deaf Studies. The analytical tools used - norm and normalization -, thought from the theorizations of Foucauldian Studies, allowed for the identification of both clinical-therapeutic and cultural knowledges acting in the teacher education curricula. The analysis showed that: 1) teachers' positioning, even of those who claimed to be prepared to work with the deaf, is still grounded on the necessity of comparison between deaf and hearing people; 2) the strong presence of hearing people in the teachers' education curricula has led the deaf to have hearing people as a reference when they talk about themselves; 3) discourses instituted by Special Education practices trigger strategies that aim at normalizing the deaf; 4) displacements caused by the insertion of knowledges that problematize the cultural deafness have been based on authors that have approached the deaf culture from an anthropological-cultural perspective; 5) the deaf are still captured by Special Education as well as by the binary opposition between deaf and hearing people which is derived from the processes of normalization that are typical of Modernity, despite the emergence of other forms of regarding the deaf in the curricula, which were produced from discursive practices aiming at talking about the cultural deaf, i.e. those who have their own language and identity constituted from their difference.