ABSTRACT
The professor Sucupira Pedroza has a unique foray into the field of School and Educational Psychology and Human Rights, with different interlocution forms in studies, research, extension actions and teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels. The interviewee in the History Section of the School and Educational Psychology Journal is a professor at the Department of School Psychology and Development, at the Institute of Psychology in the University of Brasília-UnB, where she is also a supervisor in the Postgraduate Program in Human and School Development Processes and in the Graduate Program in Human Rights and Citizenship. She is part of ANPEPP Working Group on Psychology and Educational Policies, and she has been researching about teacher training, human rights education, playing in human development, school psychology and sport psychology. Among her great theoretical inspirations are the studies of Vigotski, Wallon, Freud, and Freire. Supported by the methodology of Oral History, the researcher Fauston Negreiros carried out this interview, in which the reflections that the professor gives about her own professional trajectory are presented.
Key words:
educational psychology; human rights; teachers training
RESUMO
A Professora Doutora Regina Lucia Sucupira Pedroza tem uma incursão singular no campo da Psicologia Escolar e Educacional e dos Direitos Humanos, com diferentes formas de interlocução em estudos, pesquisas, ações de extensão e ensino na graduação e pós-graduação. A entrevistada da Seção História da Revista Psicologia Escolar e Educacional é professora do Departamento de Psicologia Escolar e Desenvolvimento, do Instituto de Psicologia da Universidade de Brasília-UnB, onde também é orientadora no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Processos de Desenvolvimento Humano e Escolar e no Programa de Pós-Graduação em Direitos Humanos e Cidadania. Integra o Grupo de Trabalho Psicologia e Políticas Educacionais da ANPEPP, e tem investigado sobre formação de professores, educação em direitos humanos, o brincar no desenvolvimento humano, psicologia escolar e psicologia do esporte. Entre suas grandes inspirações teóricas estão os estudos de Vigotski, Wallon, Freud e Freire. Respaldado pela metodologia da História Oral, o pesquisador Fauston Negreiros realizou essa entrevista, em que são apresentadas as reflexões que a professora realiza sobre sua própria trajetória profissional.
Palavras-chave:
psicologia escolar; direitos humanos; formação de professores
RESUMEN
La profesora Regina Lucia Sucupira Pedroza tiene una singular incursión em el campo de la Psicología Escolar y Educativa y de los Derechos Humanos, con diferentes formas de diálogo em estudios, investigaciones, acciones de extensión y docencia em el nivel de graduación y posgrado. La entrevistada de la Sección Historia de la Revista Psicologia Escolar e Educacional es profesora del Departamento de Psicología y Desarrollo Escolar del Instituto de Psicología de la Universidade de Brasilia-UnB, donde también es supervisora del Programa de Postgrado em Procesos de Desarrollo Humano y Escolar y em el Posgrado em Derechos Humanos y Ciudadanía. Es miembro del Grupo de Trabajo de Psicología y Políticas Educativas de la ANPEPP, y ha investigado la formación docente, la educación em derechos humanos, el jugar em el desarrollo humano, la psicología escolar y la psicología del deporte. Entre sus grandes inspiraciones teóricas se encuentran los estudios de Vigostki, Wallon, Freud y Freire. Apoyado en la metodología de la Historia Oral, el investigador Fauston Negreiros realizó esta entrevista, em la que se presentan las reflexiones que la docente hace acerca de su propia trayectoria profesional.
Palabras clave:
psicología escolar; derechos humanos; desarrollo de profesores
Fauston Negreiros: Regina, what a joy to experience this moment, interviewing a reference in Brazilian School and Educational Psychology and inspiration in the interface with Human Rights. In particular, a Paulo Freire enthusiast to inspire psychology practices in educational contexts. Could you tell us about your initial and continued training journey following the paths of School Psychology?
Regina Pedroza: Well, I need to start by thanking you immensely for this invitation, for this moment of being here recovering this memory and I think it is extremely gratifying to come across with a person as important as you for Brazilian School Psychology, and to be able to follow this path to think about our own future of School Psychology, thinking historically and what is current in the present. So I like to make this movement, which involves a very important dialectic: thinking about the past and the future to realize the present. I’ll start by telling you that I come from a family of teachers, my father and mother were teachers. My father was a university professor and my mother was a teacher, in what at the time was High School, but here we can say that it was the end of Elementary and High School, so I think my connection with the education area has always been there. I have a somewhat interrupted history of initial training, but I entered university in 1976, a long time ago, I started studying psychology at UnB and spent a year here in Brasília, then my father was transferred to Rio de Janeiro where I studied for a semester of the course in Rio de Janeiro, and soon I got married and left Brazil. My husband went to do his doctorate, and we first went to France, Paris, where I read Henri Wallon’s works for the first time, while I was still unable to enter university. And after a year and eight months, he decided to transfer his doctorate to Sweden. I went with him to the city of Lund, in the south of Sweden, and there I started studying Psychology. In this way, I began to insert myself into a society that at the time, and for a long time, was social democracy, something that always caught my attention.
I entered university on worker’s quotas and my job was to be a housewife, in other words, to be a domestic worker, and as I had been a housewife for five years, I enrolled in the Psychology course, which was very important to me. Still in France, I met several Brazilians, who at the time were exiled in Paris, and so I got in touch with the socialist bookstore and discovered Henri Wallon’s work where I started reading. I had already learned French, and with that I began to come into contact with Vygotsky’s work. It was in Sweden that I deepened these studies in a very interesting way because I arrived there in 1979, still during the dictatorship, there had been no openness, so I knew that here in Brazil these authors had not yet studied much. So I started studying them abroad in a way that there was no prohibition on studying socialist authors and, look what an incredible thing, when I arrived in Sweden, Paulo Freire’s book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” was mandatory reading in the course of Psychology, so I read Paulo Freire in Swedish, which at the time was prohibited here in Brazil.
I read this book in the Psychology course, which is also an interesting thing, because they understood that in the psychologists’ training, this relation with others was a relation that there was a tendency to be - since Hegel’s assumptions -, the question of the oppressor and the oppressed, that is, the question of the master and the servant. So, this is the importance of understanding a relationship that was more than just listening, a more horizontal relation, of course differentiated. As Paulo Freire said, the teacher-student relationship is not equal in equality (of roles), it is horizontal, but it differentiates itself, because otherwise it makes no sense.
Anyway, I returned to Brazil in 1985, but I hadn’t yet finished my Psychology course in Sweden, and when I returned, we went back to Brasília and so I joined UnB again through an optional transfer. I had to take some subjects at the very beginning of the course, as few subjects were recognized, as the workload there was different, among a series of things.
Fauston Negreiros: And your foray into School Psychology, how have you built it over these years?
Regina Pedroza: I came here (at the University of Brasília/UnB) and continued with my desire to think about the relationship between Psychology and Education, and with that I had the opportunity, here at UnB, to have a School Psychology professor, which at the time it was not a mandatory subject. The mandatory subject was Therapeutic Pedagogy, and so I took School Psychology with a teacher, which was very interesting, because she introduced reading by Maria Helena Souza Patto. So, I read the book “Psicologia e Ideologia: uma introdução crítica à psicologia escolar” by Maria Helena, and I was very interested. At the time we needed to give a seminar and I did law about this book, so I got in touch with [another professor], a landmark, Maria Helena Novaes, from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. So we studied Maria Helena Novaes and Maria Helena Souza Patto. Thus, for me, it was important to do these studies because I began to see, in a critical way, that the School Psychology that Maria Helena Novaes introduced in Brazil was a North American Psychology, and with my experience in Sweden I was able to see clearly this difference, how it was an extremely colonizing Psychology and how we reproduced this North American School Psychology in Brazil and not, for example, the European one or even with Vygotsky, or Wallon. Therefore, this moment of opening up this perspective, of thinking about School Psychology from a perspective focused on social aspects and Brazilian society itself, was very remarkable for me. We were very critical of Maria Helena Novaes’ studies, in terms of comparison, the use of psychological tests (for example). In Sweden there was already a whole criticism of the use of tests, and something very important is that they were looking for normality and ended up taking the so-called “outliers” to make sure they could be in a normality - This was my criticism of School Psychology that I was looking for the adaptation of students to the so-called “normal”!
So, I quickly took the Psychology course and when I finished, I also completed a degree, because I was already very attracted to the idea of also being a Psychology teacher. At the time of teaching schools and Normal Schools, I thought it would be good for me to have the possibility of working as a High School teacher, but soon after I decided to do a master’s degree and it coincided with the professor Sandra Francesca Conte de Almeida’s arrival in the School Psychology and Development department at UnB.
Sandra was arriving, as she had also studied in Paris and had a little knowledge of Wallon, as well as psychoanalytic training. So I started to consider the relation between Psychology and Education from the perspective of thinking about the subject in a more global, broader way, and at the time I had a teacher, Thereza Pontual de Lemos Mettel, who passed away some time ago, but she was the one who introduced Vygotsky’s studies here in Brasília, where I had studied the book “Social Formation of the Mind” with her. Sandra, on the other hand, did not have Vygotsky’s studies, so much so that I became interested in reading Freud and Wallon, and thus thinking about the contributions of Psychoanalysis and Psychology to Education. So, from that moment on, I also started to think about Psychology in terms of its contribution to teacher training and it has always been a line of research that attracted me, so much that I took this idea to my doctorate, but thinking about the teacher’s training. So, I started to study Wallon even more, and because of my ease with French, I was able to read a lot of things that hadn’t yet been translated into Portuguese, which was very interesting because at the time, that was 1989, a lot of people said “Ah! But studying Wallon and Freud, two outdated perspectives?” But I said “overcome how? Tell me!”, but was heavily criticized.
Anyway, during my master’s degree study, which at the time we were doing in four years, in 1991, the 1st National Congress of School Psychology took place in Valinhos, São Paulo, close to Campinas. I went to this Congress and the event’s speakers were a professor from here, Solange Muglia Wechsler, who later went to Campinas, but Solange was a professor here at UnB. Also part of the department was Eunice Maria Lima Soriano de Alencar, who was experienced in the Psychology of Creativity. There were other teachers, but I always had some difficulty being with them, but Sandra was very important. In Valinhos, at that congress, there was Albertina Mitjáns Martinéz. It was Albertina’s first time coming to Brazil and it was really cool because everyone wanted to talk to her, ask her about Cuba. Fernando González Rey, her husband, had been invited to give a lecture at UnB about Psychology in Cuba in general. I did this lecture and met Fernando. For me, it was very intriguing to think about Socialist Psychology, so I started reading all these readings about more socialist Psychology in Brazil, mainly with Maria Helena Souza Patto.
At the end of my master’s degree, we invited a professor (from UnB), who has already passed away, but passed away prematurely, Richard Emil Bucher, who was a psychoanalyst (and from the department of clinical psychology), and professor Heloysa Dantas de Souza Pinto, from the Faculty of Education at the University of São Paulo/USP, who was a Wallon scholar. So they were both on my master’s committee and it was great to have encouragement, both from one and the other. It was great, I have very good memories of their participation. I think it was a good moment.
I still rely a lot on my dissertation, even though I defended it in 1993. After completing my master’s degree, the competition for substitute professor at UnB came up. I did and started as a substitute teacher, where I started teaching Fundamentos do Desenvolvimento e Aprendizagem/FDA e Desenvolvimento Psicológico e Ensino/DPE. At night I taught DPE and during the day I taught FDA. Soon after I was working as a substitute teacher, there was a competition, I applied and became a permanent employee. I took the exam as a master, at that time when the competition was like that, I entered and took up the School Psychology subject and since then I have been getting closer and closer to that discipline. Well, I got pregnant of my daughter, took a few months off and came back. Soon after, Albertina was invited and stayed in our department as a guest professor for almost four years and I did some work with her at a school, which was very interesting, because at that moment we began to see that School Psychology in the Federal District had a very serious problem. There was no competition for many years and 90% of the people who worked as school psychologists, in fact, had entered the Department of Education as psychology teachers and it is a complicated issue because in 1985 or 1987, I don’t remember now, [there were established] the union of psychologists here in Brasília, and the professionals who worked as school psychologists, they did not want to stop being teachers, despite being in a different role. Sandra and I took this to the National Congress, because they earned a much higher salary as a teacher than as a psychologist, and as teachers had more vacations, at the time they retired earlier and even had an additional bonus called “pó de giz” and even if they weren’t in the classroom, they still earned this extra. It was a revolting thing, because psychologists didn’t want to lose all these benefits.
Anyway, Albertina and I started doing some work in which we showed how there was a separation in schools. There was an educational counselor, who worked with learning issues and the psychologist worked with behavioral issues. So, we entered the school and there were, for example, two separate rooms, so if the student, the child, had a complaint from the teacher due to learning difficulties he would go to the educational counselor, and if the educational counselor thought it was due to a behavior problem sent to a psychologist, it was very separate. There, Albertina and I began to do different work with a vision, a sense that Albertina brought from Cuba, and it was a general failure. The teachers didn’t want anything to do with us, they just kicked us out of the schools. To give you an idea, we scheduled a meeting with the principal and the teachers, I’m saying teachers because there were only women, and this school, at the time, was a bit far away and when we got there, I still had two students, we were “ where are the people? Where are the people?” and they said “Ah! No, they got a bus and went to the Zoo.”
[These attitudes and resistances] I believe are very much based on the issue that the work was about reflection, to make the teacher reflect about her practice and within this reflection understand that there was no learning problem, separate from development, social issues, behavior he displayed there. It was necessary to understand the entire sociocultural context, because it was a school on the outskirts and no one was willing to do that.
I defended [my master’s degree] in 1993, soon after I joined as a substitute teacher, and in September 1994 I had already been hired. I worked for five years, until 1999, and I started doing this work, always offering internships in undergraduate courses until 1996, because with the LDB where Darcy Ribeiro, - here is my criticism of Darcy, because he removed Psychology from the subjects to be offered in High School, without need, - but anyway, the students didn’t want to anymore because there was a whole discourse of “why do a degree [if it was no longer necessary]?”.
My struggle... [he focused a lot on this] I said that in the same way that Darcy decided to lead a reform of laws and basic guidelines that took Psychology away, we are still, in one way or another, placing the importance of Psychology.
The LDB did not end the teaching profession, but it did so in such a way that it [shook it], because it doesn’t make sense to have the teaching profession and have Higher Education. Then, with Lula and the Federal Institutes, if you take the graph of undergraduate students at UnB, it drops and then rises, because within some technical educations, teachers are hired who needed to have a degree in Psychology.
I waited [for a while], because it was my thing. I waited because I needed to have been a teacher for five years to be licensed for a doctorate and so I waited five years to be able to get that license and then I left.
During my doctorate, I worked with two students who were a type of “professora laranja”, who was even with Lúcia Helena Cavasin Zabotto Pulino, here at UnB, that is, they enrolled with Lúcia, but worked with me. One of them, I don’t know if you know, is a fantastic person, who did her doctorate with Albertina, Luciana Campolina. Luciana is fantastic and wrote her thesis under the Albertina’s guidance and another student, who is now doing her PhD with me, Juliana Telles, and they both worked with me on my PhD. We entered this school in a different way, because there was a teacher in the clinical department who had already done a work related to drug issues and the family, and the director asked if there was anyone who worked in education and so she invited me and I went. So, I entered this school with the intention of doing a doctorate, and thinking about the observations and notes, we started to do an “ant” style work, trying to win over the teachers, but I caught the change of government of Cristovam Buarque and the return of Joaquim Domingos Roriz [governor]. Cristovam had implemented the Candanga School, which was completely different. I spent two and a half years at this school and I was there when Roriz demanded that the student take remedial classes in the opposite shift and some teachers refused to give these classes. So, I proposed that a group of teachers do something different, I created Oficina do Brincar. This workshop became the focus of my doctoral thesis, to think about teacher training, because I had tried other things, but they hadn’t succeeded and these seven teachers agreed to participate. Luciana Campolina and Juliana Telles worked with me in this Play Workshop, and this workshop [dealt with] playing from Wallon’s perspective, from Vigotski’s perspective, that is, play became an activity without a didactic purpose. I didn’t have a didactic objective, I’m not a teacher, I’m not going to teach, I’m not going to teach anything about literacy, we were going to play. However, by chance, because everything happened without much prior planning, as I am a person who doesn’t have the constraints of having very strict planning, what happened was that on the first day the teachers gathered 28 children and we were in a very big. The children were all wearing backpacks, sitting at desks and so I invited them to sit on the floor, I sat on the floor with them and told them what we could do. I took cardboard, string and a brush to make badges and this activity alone was very interesting, because it became an identification activity. So, I gave them the papers and they started drawing. However, there was a child who took [the pencils of different colors] and started painting, looking like a mosaic and a teacher, who was there, passed by him and asked him what he was painting and he replied “my house”. It is timely to remember that all the children we were working with were diagnosed with learning difficulties. When he said that, it reminded me of something, that by chance I had a lot of books from France and Sweden by painters, so I immediately thought of Picasso. At the next meeting I took Picasso’s book to show the children. Now imagine the faces of those teachers when I started showing Picasso to the children. So I started asking what they thought the name of the painting was and they said anything. As soon as they responded, I said there were two villains and they were euphoric and curious. After that, every meeting we saw a new painter. It was wonderful. I cried with these children, seeing how involved they were, playing and doing things. So, the children started changing in the classroom, the teachers began to be amazed at them. Anyway, at the end of the year, I wanted them to move on to the second year, but the first year teachers, at the time, are a little different today, they earned an additional [salary] for being literacy teachers and they didn’t want to go to the second year, and the current second year teachers did not accept the children because they stated that they were not literate. As a result, I cried a lot.
It was time to write my thesis, leave school, and it was a real birth. When defending the thesis, people were amazed by this workshop, in fact it is my most cited article, it was only published in 2005, about the play workshop. In defense, Norberto de Abreu e Silva Neto, my doctoral advisor, asked us to think about the committee and I invited Albertina, and he said that there was someone who would really like my work and so he called Marilene Proença Rebello de Souza, from USP. I didn’t know her, that’s when I started reading her writings and she was fantastic. I don’t know if she still does this, but she wrote the arguments and took them, I still have mine today, in fact. And everything was wonderful, but what I wanted people to understand was that I couldn’t prove there was a change in the teachers. I could confirm that there were signs of change through their reports, their manifestations, as they said that they started to see the children in a different way, they recognized that the children started to become more curious, more participative in the room.
Fauston Negreiros: More than ever, the Human Rights agenda is urgently needed in School Psychology. How did you get involved in these studies?
Regina Pedroza: I defended my thesis in 2003 and in 2005, I became a tutor in the Programa de Educação Tutorial/PET. It was a wonderful experience, and at PET I created a play workshop. There was an UnB extension center in Santa Maria, and so I went every Saturday with some PET students to play in the workshop, which the children later called the “tribo da brincadeira”. This tribo da brincadeira was very interesting, because it had children from two and a half years old to teenagers of 16, so it was very diverse and very different. It was wonderful, but there were bureaucratic problems at the university that ended this nucleus. However, another group had an extension project and came to talk to me. They were from other courses and asked if I wanted to do work in an orphanage, as what is now called a shelter home used to be called. So, we went through all that internship and research again and went to this shelter to play with the children and it was wonderful, there were teenagers too and we played. At the same time, I provided supervision with the aim of training psychologists, so they began to read things they had never heard of, such as Rogers, Wallon, Vygotski, Korczak. From this work, we started going to different shelters with this workshop and with that, professor Nair Heloisa Bicalho de Sousa, from human rights at UnB, (she is from the right to education and human rights, was part of the National Education Committee in Human Rights, from the Human Rights Secretariat of the Presidency of the Republic) learned about my work and found it very important, in the sense of thinking about play as a children’s right.
The Janusz Korczak was the precursor to the declaration of children’s rights, prior to the universal declaration of human rights. He was killed in the Second World War, but he had already written the book about the child’s right to respect with another book “When I am little again”. Anyway, I never wrote an article about this exactly, but they said “Regina, it’s not just the children who are changing, but us too.” and that for me was very beautiful and very stimulating to work on. With that, Nair called me, talking about this work with children, so my entry into human rights was through this work in shelter homes.
After that, I started doing work that was also very interesting about the training of caregivers and at that time it was really cool because Norberto helped me a lot. My theme was about the formation of the person in different social contexts.
Thus, in 2010 or 2012, Nair, Zé Geraldo, a Law professor, myself, and there was another person, created the Postgraduate Course in Human Rights, which is the one we currently have and it has already more than ten years. It started with a Master’s degree and now it also has a doctorate, so I became a teacher there from the beginning. My master’s student, who is now doing her doctorate with me, started working with training caregivers for the disabled and another student worked with caregivers for the elderly. With this, we can see that there are different themes, but they are always linked.
I had a student in human rights, who was from the military police, this was difficult for me, he did a dissertation about thinking about the training of socio-educational agents. Very complex. He developed a reading project, in which he would pass by with a cart of books to encourage reading.
In 2014, Marilene Proença invited me to join the Working Group/GT “Psychology and Educational Policies” of the National Association for Research and Postgraduate Studies in Psychology - ANPEPP. I went to the first meeting in Rio Grande do Sul. Anyway, for me, it was really cool to be in the book organized by the GT (Campos, Souza, & Facci, 2016Campos, H. R., Souza, M. P. R de, & Facci, M. G. D. (Ed.). (2016). Psicologia e políticas educacionais. Natal/RN: Editora da UFRN.). And around 2016, I was invited by Rogério Giannini to be part of the plenary session of the Federal Council of Psychology and it was wonderful. We met through Carla Biancha Angelucci, a professor at USP and then we got to know each other even more at the XI National Congress of School and Educational Psychology, in Uberlândia/MG, in 2013.
When I was on the Federal Council, I was always on education agendas and right away there were meetings of the 14 professions in the health area, with the movement being created against the Ministry of Education, about the issue of distance learning. So I started to be part of some things and was called out for being in Brasília. I also took part, and I even loved it, at a forum to reduce social inequality. This forum was created by the council of economists, it still exists, but I am no longer there, with representation from several entities and I said “I want to go” and so Psychology was invited and I started to participate. We had meetings every week to discuss possibilities for action in relation to reducing social inequality and [who] spoke a lot, who did [a lot] too, many interventions, was Dilma Rousseff’s former minister, Tereza Campello. She’s fantastic, when she opened her mouth to speak... Wow, it was wonderful. She had a lot of activities on the agenda and it was really great, I loved participating, I learned a lot.
At the end of the president Michel Temer’s government, in 2018, a human rights education committee was created in what is still called the Ministry of Human Rights and several entities were invited to form this committee; with that, Psychology too. So, this notice was presented at the Federal Council of Psychology - CFP - and I said “I think I have a CV that goes well with this”, because they look at the CV a lot, and as I had already worked in the Postgraduate Course in Human Rights at the UnBe I was already doing some work, they put forward my candidacy and Psychology, for the first time, I was part of this committee. It was very cool and, at the same time, short, because I think I went to three or four meetings, no more than that (it was one meeting a month), and then Damares Alves, former minister in Jair Bolsonaro’s government, came in and revoked it, because [the committee] was by decree and she annulled it. It was very difficult for me because it was a place for a lot of exchange, dialogue and, in fact, there was a teacher who represented the Ministry of Education and we discussed a lot about the direction the National Education Council was taking, because its composition was already moving towards being almost represented only by private colleges.
Fauston Negreiros: Regarding educational policies and human rights, how do you evaluate this relation currently in Brazil?
Regina Pedroza: So, I’m amazed because several students, who did the School Psychology internship with me, took the exam, passed and are now school psychologists at the Department of Education.
I work not only with historical-cultural Psychology, [but also] with Psychoanalysis, but I work with Psychoanalysis on the issue of thinking about all this importance [and seeing] that those who make the institution are the subjects, they who have history, culture and a whole process, what I call a historical-dialectic process, of this movement of past and future coming to fruition in the present. I believe this is very important. Psychology and I work with subjects inserted in society.
So, I think that [it is necessary] to listen to the teacher, all the actors at the school, as subjects of the institution. I can’t listen to the institution; how do you listen to an institution? I have this incompetence!
Ultimately, it is a great pleasure to have many former students who are now school psychologists at the Department of Education and who are trying to criticize the model that was put in place, based on the psychopedagogical teams. In Julia Chagas’ dissertation from 2010, in which I was a supervisor, we criticized this vision of this psychopedagogical booklet of the work of psychologists and pedagogues together, but which, ultimately, does not have a differentiated view at schools. Today, I have been working at the Regional Council (CRP 01/DF) on the issue of implementing the new Law 13,935/2019, on the work of the school psychologist with the social worker.
I think that School Psychology has historically suffered more than perhaps Psychology itself as a whole. I talk to my students about who a school psychologist is. First and foremost, a school psychologist is a psychologist. To this end, the first article of the psychologist’s code of ethics is his commitment to human rights, so I’ve been banging on and I want to see if we can write something about the school psychologist’s code of ethics, in the sense of the school institution, as this psychologist will work on human rights issues, that is, he cannot discriminate. It is in the code of ethics that the psychologist cannot discriminate, but what is he doing when he labels and says that a child needs to go to the doctor because he does not learn? What is his dialogue with my teacher? With the family? What is the situation for this student to learn? So, it is assumed that he is violating, this is strong, but it is true, the school psychologist does this medicalization, he is discriminating against the student. I think so.
In the last observation I made in the classroom, a student, a black boy, approached a black girl, seven years old, and said “I don’t like you” and the girl asked, in front of me and the teacher, “why that you don’t like me?” (and he responds) “because of your skin color, I don’t like the color of your skin”. The teacher then turned to the boy and said “you can’t say that, you can’t say that, her skin color isn’t ugly” and with that the students each went to her side. Afterwards, I talked to the teacher, because we lost a moment of problematization, at least, as the boy is black and he is saying that he doesn’t like the color of the black girl’s skin. So how does he feel about the color of his skin? The psychologist cannot listen to the institution, I don’t know how he does this, but he has to be moving in these spaces, he has to be in the collective, talking to teachers, humbly, without thinking he has answers for everything. This is a very important issue for me in Psychology, because I also work in the clinic, I lived and worked for many years, even before the pandemic. I also worked at the teaching clinic, giving internships to students, so I think we are very arrogant, we don’t know how to listen. I always said that my clinic is Vigotskian, Wallonian, Freirean, because they are people who help me think about interpersonal relations.
In the clinic, my work as a psychotherapist, especially for children, is very much within this perspective of thinking about how I am going to listen to the child and again Korczak taught me that I can only get to know the child by letting him speak to me. And how will she talk to me? Playing, being aggressive, painting, doing whatever, but I have to listen to this child and not just listen to, for example, mother, father, the school, the teacher. So that’s it, [that’s] my work as a school psychologist [and how] I work to this day.
I have a former student from the Department of Education. She works at a school, which we call Escola Classe Comunidade de Aprendizagem do Paranoá (CAP) and which works from the perspective of Escola da Ponte, a reference throughout the world. It’s [a job] very difficult, it’s not easy, but the point is that you try to get into the classroom more. The school psychologist needs this, but he is not a teacher, I do not defend this, he does not have to tell the teacher what he should do, but as Wallon says, [we should] talk to the teacher, in his class observation, saying “I think that with this method you are using, the child is not taking advantage” and not saying what the best method is, but strengthening the teacher’s work.
Fauston Negreiros: Taking into account your journey as a school psychologist, researcher and teacher who trains other school psychologists, what advances can the area bring to the issue of human rights?
Regina Pedroza: I’m going to bring up Paulo Freire again, because I think we have to make educational policy in the sense of a movement of denunciation and announcement, that is, when doing Psychology you have to have research and research needs you to really involve, so as not to end up with research in which you start from any assumption. Many people today say that they are involved in qualitative research, for example, but in what way is it qualitative? How do you get involved with research? So I think you have to be part of it, yes, arriving at the research site and allowing yourself to be surprised, starting from the principle that you don’t know everything, recognizing that you know something, but as Paulo Freire said, recognizing in others what the other has to teach me. Research is also a moment of learning for the researcher. The researcher who wants to learn when doing research will have elements to report the situation he saw and announce the proposals. Wallon also said at the beginning of the 20th century that Psychology cannot just be descriptive, it has to be explanatory, and as Vygotsky said, a science in favor of changing society and that is what I want. Psychology that thinks “I don’t like what is there” and then if I don’t like it, through my profession, through my knowledge, we will have instruments and tools for changing society, in the sense of human rights, not only in terms of It is included in the 12 items of the Declaration of Human Rights, because this is a declaration made by white European men and I don’t know what the other needs in terms of rights. The right to life, for example, what is the right to life? It is the life of a tree; this is the indigenous person’s right to life. So, today, it is not part of my daily life to think of the tree as something very far from me.
I think that educational policy has a lot to help with this issue of because we are in a literate society, it is a fact with schools, so from these educational policies you can know, obviously if you are also interested in knowing, the rights by which people are struggling and not always, or better said, books don’t teach, it’s not all in the books. I talk about this a lot, in the discipline of human rights, that it is important to have decrees and laws, but we cannot be stuck with that. Human rights involve something cultural and historical, so we shouldn’t be trapped by what has been declared and we shouldn’t criticize everything. Because, therefore, Freud did not talk about the LGBTQIA+ population, but he provided terms to think about the subject of the unconscious and how I can think about an LGBTQIA+ person. I quote Wallon a lot to my students and say that he never entered a shelter here in Brasília, he was never in Brasília, so you are the ones who know these children.
I think that what is missing in the training of our students is to make them get involved, and thus believe in their ability to build knowledge. They tell me a lot “Ah, but he can’t say anything, because the teacher asks who said that”, but they were the ones who said it. So I think we should [instigate them] to build knowledge based on what already exists about the subject.
Fauston Negreiros: In your opinion, what challenges still need to be faced regarding this issue?
Regina Pedroza: The challenges of working on human rights are the issues of racism, sexism, classism, LGBTphobia and other issues that I have faced a lot, especially because I am disabled, such as the issue of ableism, which have remained throughout the generations. Teachers still want to include and include, and for some people it is wanting to make it normal, and when there is conflict in a class, in the classroom, it is difficult for a teacher to come and say “how are we going to resolve it?” and listen to what children can say to you, to see this right respected. Despite this, the daily routine of each school and the school community continue to teach us how to deal with and construct these confrontations in the best way.
I had an experience at a very beautiful school, but it was difficult because here in Brasília, the public school, sometimes, is not just with students from the neighborhood, from that community, and even so, you receive the family to do something that is not whether it’s just complaining about their children, that’s terrible. I’m a mother and my two oldest children studied in public school and I said to the teachers “what’s up?” They said that my children had no problems and I said “so does that mean you only talk if there is a problem? Why don’t you tell me what they are like, what they like, what they don’t like so I can also think about what they like and don’t like at home?”
Fauston Negreiros: For you, how can political training and participation in social movements influence the work of school psychologists?
Regina Pedroza: When people talk about politics, they get confused with party issues. You yourself, who are now in a laboratory called Ágora, know that it is a political space. I’ve already taught citizenship and human rights classes, but I started by saying that politics comes from the polis, the organization of how society is at that moment. So politically, it is very important for the school psychologist that he has training in how the school is inserted in the space, which is a social, cultural, geographic space, mentioning here someone I really like, Milton Santos. He shows me the importance of nothing happening by chance. How is the city organized? You have to know this, because if he passes the exam and goes to work in a suburban school, how will he get there with Wallon, Vygotsky, Piaget and Freud? How will he want to act with those children? Not that I want to say that this child will have to be treated differently, that’s not it, but it means knowing the geographic, social, political and cultural space. People sometimes think of culture as Brazilian, European, Asian culture and they don’t think that culture is a way of values, ways of expressing oneself artistically, and everything that fits into culture in the pilot plan differs from culture of a satellite city (Administrative Region of the Federal District), for example.
The school psychologist will only be able to truly listen to others, in this political moment in which he is experiencing extreme polarization, if he understands that the school must also be a political-social project of social movements. An example of this that I like to tell was when a nine-year-old child comes home and has to cook, sweep the house, tidy up her siblings, put them to bed and her mother works all day, how can I listen that? The complaint, which is something that cannot just be from the teacher over the student, but the complaint from a mother as a woman in this country, the complaint from a mother who suffers violence at home, how am I going to listen to a child who has been beaten to a friend and said “my father hits my mother, why can’t I hit her?” How can I be a school psychologist if I can’t listen to this? Here I have to think about training. The psychology course needs to let students talk a lot more, because it has changed a lot since I started 28 years ago, when I started to be a teacher, the reality is different and that is wonderful, we already have the quotas.
So, there are many students who bring experiences and we need to learn once and for all that we are not owners of knowledge, we are not [even] as teachers, and so I refer again to my gorgeous countryman, Paulo Freire.
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This paper was translated from Portuguese by Ana Maria Pereira Dionísio.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
18 Dec 2023 -
Date of issue
2023
History
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Received
15 Sept 2023 -
Accepted
23 Oct 2023
