EDITORIAL

Education and Research team starts the year full of reasons to celebrate again. Through the use of ahead of print, a publication resource of SciELO System, our reader can now have first-hand access to the articles approved, even before they are published on paper. Just refer to the page of the journal's at SciELO website (http://www.scielo. br) and there you can find not only the published articles, but also the other texts awaiting printing, which speeds up the dissemination of the research results of our authors.

In addition, since 2011 Education and Research has published four issues per year, consolidating the process begun in 2010 with the publication of a special issue. This is another mechanism to accelerate the circulation of information, through which we hope to collaborate in the dissemination of the large number of contributions received by the journal from Brazil and from abroad.

Finally, Education and Research is preparing our second section of Driven Demand, under the coordination of Claudia Pereira Vianna and Vinicio de Macedo Santos, which will be on Inequality, Difference and public policies for education, and it should be released in March 2013.

Given the large number of theoretical and political challenges we face daily in the educational field, it was not easy to define the motto of this theme section. What subject would be the most productive for debate, research and teaching practice? What would be the most suitable editorial choice to combine articles with a common axis, so that the texts were enriched in the dialogue? How to delimit the issue in a way that is clear enough and at the same time open to very diverse approaches?

Everything indicates that it was wise to choose the issue of equality in the context of struggles for the right to diversity and expansion of citizenship, a debate that is constantly present in the pages of Education and Research. It is precisely on this issue that José Carlos Libâneo, for example, concludes his dense article which we open this issue of the journal with. In The perverse dualism of the Brazilian public school: school of knowledge for the rich, school of social care for the poor, Libâneo invites us to engage in deep reflection on the directions of the educational policy in recent decades. He concludes that we should seek to respond to the challenge of building a school that aims at "the mastery of systematic knowledge through which we promote the development of intellectual capacities, as a condition to ensure the right to likeness and to equality on the one hand. On the other hand, we must consider that the primary function of school - cultural and scientific education - is intended for different subjects, since differences are not an exceptionality of human beings, but a concrete condition of human beings and educational situations."

Next, the article Basic education as proposed by the National Confederation of Industry - CNI - in the 2000s, by Alessandro de Melo, examines the educational project of the Brazilian businessmen gathered in this entity, bringing to light a plan of educational policy in many ways implemented in the government actions of that period.

The dimensions of difference and inequality mark the next two texts: The intercultural curriculum discourse in the education of youngsters and adults and the production of subjectivities, by Rosangela Tenorio de Carvalho, and Gender and children's culture: school clubinhos and the trocinhas of Bom Retiro, by Tania Mara Cruz. While Carvalho opposes the curriculum homogenizing forms, analyzing discourses on interculturality in the context of education of young people and adults, Cruz reveals, through the ethnographic study of recess in a primary school, the multiple developments of children's cultures around gender relations. The situations observed by Cruz in 2001 are compared to findings of Florestan Fernandes in his study of children's play in the streets of Sao Paulo in the 1940s.

Ethical issues are present in three articles with different approaches. In the text Educative institutions and the community faced with child maltreatment: an experiment of participative action research, María Dilia Mieles Barrera, María Victoria Gaitán Espitia and Renan Cepeda Gaitán conducted participatory research into child abuse in a poor community in the Caribbean region of Colombia. They indicate the role of educational institutions in the protection of children. The historical perspective marks the text Faculties of the soul and their implications for education: knowledges circulated in the 19th century, by Raquel Martins de Assis. In a periodical published from 1877 to 1899, in the town of Baependi, Minas Gerais, the author investigated the views expressed on moral and aesthetic education. Such study has contributed to a better understanding of the history of psychology in Brazil, especially with regard to school psychology. Renato José de Oliveira, in the article entitled Contributions of argumentative rationality for addressing ethics in school, seeks to present an alternative model to work with ethics in basic education, replacing the model known as demonstrative reasoning.

Daily work in schools is analyzed in the articles The Development of Managerial Skills in State Public Schools, by Veronica Bezerra de Araújo Galvão, Anielson Barbosa da Silva and Walmir Rufino da Silva, Theory and practice in the education undergraduate course, by Giseli Barreto da Cruz, Territorialist nationalism in school textbooks: representations of Patagonia in Argentinian military dictatorship (1966-1983), by Jesus Jaramillo, and Metacognitive categories as a support of pedagogical practices, by Evelise Maria Labatut Portilho and Simone A. Souza Dreher. The first article seeks to understand the development of managerial skills among public school principals in a state capital of the northeast of Brazil, noting that, according to the principals' responses to the questionnaire used, formal education has had little impact on this process, which has been due particularly to their personal and professional experiences. The complex relationship between theory and practice in education undergraduate courses is exactly the object of the reflection of Cruz, who draws on interviews with seventeen educators considered primary by the author for having witnessed and participated in the process of implementation of the course in Brazil, and for having stood out later in the academic field. Writing from the province of Neuquén, Argentina, Jaramillo foregrounds the analysis of textbooks, revealing how they represented the region of Patagonia during the dictatorships from 1966 to1973 and from 1976 to 1983. In the article by Portilho and Dreher, the focus is on each child and his or her learning process. Drawing on qualitative research with 396 first grade students of an elementary school in the state of Parana, the authors sought to understand the metacognitive strategies used by children in the literacy process.

The current journal issue closes with a set of texts which address methodological issues of research in education from the perspective of different theoretical references. The fact that they are presented together reflects a concern with highlighting the wealth of the reflections on methodology present in the articles spontaneously submitted to the journal. This is a strong indicator of the degree of maturity of research in the educational field, because it reveals how aware of the methodological discussion and how concerned with deepening it while conducting their investigations researchers are.

In The evolution of expected schooling in Brazil in the 20th century, Otaviano Helene tests two different statistical procedures to assess the expected schooling in Brazil over the last century, boldly articulating history and education statistics. In the text entitled Between trajectories, sources and subjects: research in education and the use of oral history, Rosimar Serena Siqueira Esquinsani revisits the results of previously conducted research on the approval of the Law of Guidelines and Bases of National Education number 4024, 1961, and reflects on the social places of the subjects who tell their stories. In the paper Conceptions of validity in qualitative studies, Leila Giandoni Ollaik and Henrique Moraes Ziller debate the validity criteria in qualitative research, not limited to the educational field. Finally, Research in education: social movements and epistemological reconstruction in a context of coloniality, by Danilo Romeu Streck and Telmo Adams, repositions and illuminates the issues of knowledge construction in the educational field, seeking an emancipatory investigative action in Latin America in line with the concept of epistemologies of the South.

As the reader can see, this is one of the most representative journals of the education production throughout the country, with authors from São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, Paraíba, Goiás and Distrito Federal, in addition to neighboring Colombia, Chile and Argentina. There are authors linked to colleges and centers of the field of education, but also from the areas of physics, administration, social sciences and psychology. Overall, the articles collect essays and results of qualitative and quantitative research in micro and macro social perspectives, which use instruments as diverse as statistical modeling, action research, questionnaire or life stories. Also, they rely on different theoretical frameworks such as the post-colonial perspective, Foucauldian analysis and learning skills. This diversity is a source of pride for us and reflects the policy of intellectual openness and stimulation of free academic debate that has marked the editorial line of Education and Research.

Finally, we emphasize that two articles are also available in English in SciELO website: The perverse dualism of the Brazilian public school: school of knowledge for the rich, school of social care for the poor and Research in education: social movements and epistemological reconstruction in a context of coloniality.

Marília Pinto de Carvalho

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  06 Mar 2012
• Date of issue
  Mar 2012