A reforma educacional do ensino médio no Rio Grande do Sul: um estudo a partir do contexto da prática

Abstract

This dissertation has as its theme the reform of Polytechnic High School in Rio Grande do Sul, proposed by the state Department of Education (SEDUC), between 2011and 2014. We have tried to emphasize the implications and contradictions of curricular restructuring in the context of practice, considering the tense and troubled process observed throughout the school network. Thus, we have performed a case study at Emília Viega da Rocha school, located in the town of Gravataí/RS, understanding that this reality is a significant one and explanatory of the contradictions generated on the school’s ground, since the implementation of such reform. As methodological tools we have employed semi-structured interviews with school administrators and teachers, mixed with Integrated Seminars questionnaires, participation in teacher training meetings and observation of everyday school life in order to detect the way the school organizes, systematizes and reframes its practice with the curricular restructuring proposal guidelines. We have used the historical-critical perspective as reference to the review of higher school education history, understanding of the SEDUC/RS proposal and understanding and explaining the context of practice, dialoguing with works of Antonio Gramsci, Acacia Kuenzer, Demerval Saviani, Monica Ribeiro da Silva, Gaudencio Frigotto, Marise Ramos, David Harvey, Antonio Teodoro, Vera Peroni, among others. We have noted that the context of school practice, when demonstrating resistance, reinterpretations and reconfigurations of the policy, allowed us to highlight the contradictions generated from the reform implementation. It follows that the proposal has both limits and possibilities for building a school with social quality for all. While that curriculum restructuring brings in its theoretical and methodological frameworks the prospect of taking work as an educational principle, scientific research as a pedagogical principle and critical evaluation in an inclusive perspective, the research shows that, in the context of practice, new visions and interpretations can change the directions underlying the policy. For instance, in the initial proposal, referenced upon Gramsci’s socialist pedagogy, work is considered as constitutive of the human being in his/her interrelationship with nature at its use value. However, the hegemonic reality of today's society (and the school under analysisis no exception) takes working for its exchange value, tending to reproduce the dictates of the capitalist market valuation, as power/domination/competition and to end in a simplistic preparation for the market job. The research has provided an opportunity to realize that implementing the proposal presents a set of limits, among which is the issue of lack of understanding of its principles, the unpreparedness of teachers, the tendency to simply prepare our young people for the job market, the infrastructural difficulties and resistance about the way emancipatory evaluation was put by SEDUC/RS. Concomitantly, some advances were evident in the autonomy of the school management and of teachers in building a syllabus closer to what they feel are the student’s needs, the pedagogical training of teachers at school, the methodology of scientific research work in the curriculum, enabling to rethink issues historically posited as absolute truths. Even with such huge contradictions, we argue that the educational reform will not solve the problems of education, but it points to new possibilities of rethinking high school.