Research about education, specifically that conducted in Graduate Schools of Education in Brazil and abroad, has presented society in general a body of knowledge, arguments, criticisms and viable paths to support the discussion and realization of advances and transformation of the structural and daily conditions of educational practices in a wide variety of levels and modalities. The Revista Brasileira de Educação[The Brazilian Education Journal] (RBE), is committed to a social and political agenda that addresses the contemporary challenges in education. The journal has expanded the interlocution of the scientific community with the community responsible for public education policies to increase the choice of priorities, the critical articulation of actions and to guarantee better working conditions for education professionals, as well as better study and learning opportunities for children, adolescents, youth and adults in contexts of increasing internationalization.
To maintain its commitment to intervention in this international scene, the RBE is adopting bilingual publication in Portuguese and English of some of its articles, in the journal’s on-line version. This editorial decision, which involves increased production costs and the reformulation of the journal’s administrative routines, was the result of an intense discussion in the field of scientific communication in Brazil and abroad. The RBE has been participating in this debate in multiple forums: within the educational field, we can highlight the reflection produced by the RBE Editorial Commission, at board meetings of the National Association of Graduate Studies in Education (ANPEd), and at meetings of the Forum of Journal Editors in the Field of Education (FEPAE). In the broader Brazilian scientific field, we can highlight participation at events promoted by the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) and by the Brazilian Association of Scientific Editors (ABEC).
The objective of the bilingual publication, is evidently the internationalization of production in the field, which more than a demand of evaluation and finance agencies, represents the opportunity to circulate research results presented by RBE beyond Brazilian borders. The predominant presence of English as the lingua franca of scientific communication is not free of political and economic implications, and thus to publish in English does not distance us from an intent to defend Portuguese and other vernacular languages as legitimate means of expression of scientific and academic knowledge. It is important to mention that we are not under the illusion that publishing articles in English guarantees the international circulation of production in the field, because internationalization is not reduced to a sharing of a linguistic code. Geopolitical issues related to the distribution of power and knowledge must be faced, or there is a risk that international scientific communication – understood as a space for dialog free of constraints for the expression of differences in conditions of equality among countries and cultures – will follow the trend of economic internationalization characterized by inequalities and the production of social exclusion.
The articles published in Portuguese and English in this issue are the result of spontaneous adhesion by the authors, who accepted the Editorial Commission’s invitation to present a translation of their texts for publication. We consider this criteria as a starting point in the process, and in the medium term future we intend to publish all of the articles in Portuguese and English. However, to do so, we must be prepared administratively and particularly financially.
The themes, methodologies, provocations, analyses and interpretations proposed in the various articles of this issue number 62, focus on two privileged themes in the dialog between the scientific field and society. The first topic concerns teacher education, and is addressed in the first six studies; the second addressed in the last four articles, and in the book review that concludes this issue, focuses on the relations between institutions – school, family, church – and their intercessions in the constitution of singularities and diversities, in concrete contexts.
The article by Ana Laura Godinho Lima and Denice Barbara Catani recomposes a research path in the history of education based on a study of educational psychology texts used for teacher education in Brazil from the 1920s to the 1960s. The text presents a specific perspective by exploring tensions between notions of individual differences and personality, demonstrating their persistence and resignification over history. In an instigating manner, the authors conclude the reflection with this question: “How long can we affirm that the paths of knowledge, classification and control should continue to be followed in the manner that they have been in terms of educational issues?”
Marcela Gaete Vergara also presents in her text some contradictions related to the guarantee of the singularities of individuals in educational processes, supporting her arguments with concepts about historic time and school cultures. It is a study that interprets the logics that mobilize, articulate and shape students in pedagogy courses for high school teaching in Chile during their professional practice process. In the article, the interpretation of interviews and conjunctural analyses of educational systems reveals two conditions of production: on one hand, the form of the school constitutes other types of subjectivity, based on other symbolic territories, requiring the implementation of didactic actions outside the logic of a linear and progressive process, on the other hand, and contradictorily, the work of teachers that is undertaken in a the same modern episteme that does not account for uncertainty in the classroom process, and in the temporality of subjects.
In her article, Hildete Pereira dos Anjos expands the study of singularities in teacher education, by analyzing a research-education experience with the life histories of teachers in inclusive education. Based on these narratives, she analyzes the experiences, the authorship and new meanings of pedagogical action, which emerge in the process of conducting research with teachers. The article highlights the collective actions of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction in the act of collectively and individually narrating the lived experience.
By means of professional development and in interaction with new technologies, Patrícia Alexandra da Silva Ribeiro Sampaio and Clara Pereira Coutinho address the education of mathematics teachers in Portugal, defending various experiences, in classroom contexts, which involve the investigation, planning and practice of reflection. They articulate this posture by theoretically and empirically interweaving the proposal that teachers interpret and alter and then proceed to review and adapt the curriculum prescribed using the conceptual framework about technology supported by the Pedagogical and Technological Knowledge of Content (TPACK), based on the Shulman formulation.
Two other articles highlight the influence of administrative models in continuing education programs for teachers in Brazil, proposed and financed by state and federal agencies. In the first article, Luís Armando Gandin and Iana Gomes de Lima present results of a study about the implementation of pedagogical intervention programs, conducted between 2007 and 2010, in schools in Rio Grande do Sul State. The analysis, based on notions of performativity, administration and quality processes, give visibility to the insertion of “corrective” actions by private institutions in the public space. The authors call attention to the processes of disqualification and requalification of the work of teaching and warn that the later can combine, in the schools studied, with the learning of new skills, the capacity to rigorously comply with bureaucratic activities and display results.
In the second article, Elba Siqueira de Sá Barretto analyzes teacher education based on the results of two large studies sponsored by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2009 and 2011 about the condition of teaching in Brazil. The author discusses public policies for teacher education, from financing to educational administration, including new technologies, the relevance of accreditations, the profiles of teachers and the programs for continuing education. In her conclusions, she highlights that “the new forms of teacher education” tend to concentrate on the acquisition of expertise in the management of human and organizational resources of the school to achieve the proposed goals.
The four final articles are related to studies focused on the relations between education, popular cultures, family and religion. Most of these articles provide an opportunity to critically analyze the (dis)junctions between school and cultural traditions, which may or may not receive agency from traditional institutions such as the family and the church. The article by Álamo Pimentel, based on the reports of students in the undergraduate course in pedagogy of a public institution in Salvador, Bahia, discusses the meanings of street games, from the perspective of children and their mothers and fathers. The principal theme of the study is the discussion of heterogeneous and cultural practices that stimulate social phenomenon, articulated with the concept of ecology of knowledge. Politically, they highlight the epistemological challenge of constructing new sustainable correlations in the interaction of different forms of knowledge with the social practices to which they confer movement.
In their article, Deise Azevedo Longaray and Paula Regina Costa Ribeiro critically analyze a set of statements that have in heteronormativity one of their most powerful forms of regulation and governmentality of processes of subjectivization of gays, transvestites and transsexual people. Using Foucautian tools of discourse analysis, thematic oral history methodology and participant observation, the authors call attention to the important role of the family as the first space of socialization. Its effect on these processes strives for a coherence between sex, gender, sexual practice and desire. The authors also analyze the role of religious institutions, as well as that of LGBT associations, interpreting their discourses considering the tension between education and efforts to steer the attitudes and postures of individuals – that is, establishing standards of normality – and the construction of visibility for LGBT identities based on a process of transgression of the imposed norms.
In the field of the sociology of education, the relations between family and school are also of strong interest for their contributions to understanding the conditions conferred by specific sociocultural marks. In this direction, Cláudio Marques Martins Nogueira, Tânia de Freitas Resende and Maria José Braga Viana emphasize in their article the social processes of school performance of public school students in Belo Horizonte, relating them to the objective conditions of their families, which are apparently similar from a macro-sociological perspective. Using as sources interviews with the families, the profile of the school attended and results on the Prova Brasil exams, they highlight the mobilization found at the interior of a concrete relationship, involving a family, a child and a specific school that is more or less apt to stimulate and bring to fruition the educational efforts that are established in this network of relations between the family, the student and school.
The last article adds to the contributions of observation and immersion in reality, which is studied by conducting interviews that are analyzed with ethicalaesthetic sensibility in the written recomposition of the events studied. Stela Guedes Caputo brings to the surface a theme that is wounded, and therefore, often silenced: religious intolerance. The article reveals, in a work that focuses on the perspective of studies of daily life, the case of places of worship of candomblé, known as terreiros, and the lessons that they can provide, in an effort to respond to questions such as: “What would happen if this knowledge could be emphasized, valorized and stimulated by teachers of history and African cultures? Is it possible that the greater the silencing the greater the racism, the conservative attitudes and the religious intolerance?”
In consonance with various texts published in this edition of the RBE, a book review written by Lea Pinheiro Paixão is presented, which highlights important and original contributions of the book Família & escola: novas perspectivas de análise, [Family and School: New analytical perspectives] organized by Geraldo Romanelli, Maria Alice Nogueira and Nadir Zago.
The Revista Brasileira de Educação, dedicated to its on-line internationalization, hopes this new publication will provide continuity and expand borders in direction of the necessary and always urgent articulation between academic-scientific research and society in general. This will allow circulating advances and questioning to mobilize other proposals in the field of education, and strengthen elements that motivate the administration and evaluation of educational policies.
Rio de Janeiro, July 2015
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Sept 2015
