EDITORIAL

Lúcia Bruno

We open this issue of Education and Research with an essay by Maria Helena Souza Patto entitled Distance learning and the demise of education. It constitutes a critical approach to distance higher education based on an analysis of the official discourse that presents it as a natural product of the more recent transformations in Western societies. In such context, the dominant conception of progress silences over the existing contradictions and also over the basis of a culture industry that transforms elements of culture into objects for consumption. In this new social scenario, often denominated post-modern, the author identifies a kind of teaching that is driven by a capitalist rationality, since it is based on the principles of speed and efficiency. School becomes then part of a group of "social institutions that produce the one-dimensional man - the man that has lost the autonomy necessary for a critique of the existing when he internalized the objective logic in the deepest realms of his subjectivity". Souza Patto suggests that the university, in contrast with private institutions that respond to the needs filtered by the market, must preserve culture, appropriating it and reflecting critically upon it. The article raises polemical issues that, we believe, will help to deepen the ongoing debate about the technologies of information and the education of new generations.

The article by Guilherme Torres Corrêa and Victoria Maria Brant Ribeiro, entitled The pedagogical formation in higher education and the role of stricto sensu graduate studies is based on Pierre Bourdieu's ideas, and argues for the importance of developing a culture of valuation of teaching in universities. It starts from the idea that such valuation would stimulate the development of a pedagogical capital and the creation of a habitus at this level of teaching, at which the valuation of the accumulation of scientific capital has predominated in the last decades. The authors situate the pedagogical formation within the public policies, analyzing the National Plan for Graduate Studies. Together with the two articles that succeed it in this issue, this text brings a new dimension to the critique of the excellence criteria adopted and foisted on the scientific community by assessment agencies and research financing bodies, criteria based on the incentive to research in detriment to the pedagogical formation of the teacher.

The next article, The relations between research in Science teaching and teacher education: representations, by Maria José P. M. de Almeida and Roberto Nardi, deals with the relation between research, teaching and the education of Science teachers, focusing on the field of Physics through a research carried out in 2005. The article works with a universe constituted by 13 researchers that work or did work in Faculties and Departments of Education or Physics in disciplines from the Licentiateship in Physics at institutes of higher education and graduate studies. The authors developed their work from an analysis of the discourse of the interviewees and made use of the theoretical contributions of Michel Pêcheux. The question that oriented the study was the following: "The formation and growth of the area of the teaching of Sciences has interfered in the way in which teachers are educated in Brazil?" It is interesting to observe that a non-homogeneous picture of the understanding of the question can be detected in the answers obtained, which will certainly stimulate many reflections by the reader interested in this theme.

Next, we have the article entitled Teaching apprenticeship: professional formation, preparation for teaching, or temporary teaching? by Nathália de Fátima Joaquim, Ana Alice Vilas Boas and Alexandre de Pádua Carrieri. It is a research with students enrolled in a graduate studies program in Management at a federal University in Minas Gerais. The work was conducted based on a single, but fundamental, question: what is the meaning attributed by the students to teaching apprenticeship? Throughout the text, the authors deal with a delicate theme - teaching activities exercised by graduate students as substitutes to their supervisors -, presenting data about it. In view of the fact that this subject has been discussed in many universities where such modality of apprenticeship exists, although under various labels, the publication of this work is quite opportune. Besides, by observing what they call a predominance of the researcher over the teacher, the authors insist in the importance of teaching apprenticeship to the formation of graduate students in Management, in so far as it affords them the necessary approximation between pedagogical theory and teaching practice. As we can see, the problem of teacher education reappears in many areas of knowledge, revealing perhaps a question of a character that is more structural than particular or localized.

Following that, we have two articles which, although dealing with the teaching practice, are not located within the sphere of higher education, but delve into the universe of schools of fundamental education. The first of them, authored by Oscar Nail Kröyer, Máximo Munõz Reyes and Jorge Gajardo Aguayo and entitled Guiding principles of common life in the classroom: a collective reflection strategy, discusses the guiding principles of common life in the classroom based on a study conducted at a public school in the city of Concepción in Chile. Fifteen teachers took part in the study, along with 20 families and 20 students. The authors conclude their study proposing a group of procedures that begin with gathering empirical data about the more pressing problems of school common life. After such diagnostics, it would be up to the teachers to create rules of common life in the classroom based on a consensus, on a "common ground" of norms. In this sense, the spaces for reflection and dialogue are crucial, since they make it possible to reach an equilibrium between the norm, the student and the teacher. The management of the norms within the stationary sphere requires, according to the authors, a process of coordination which must stem from the school management, tying together teachers, students and their families. Such dialogue is fundamental to build a balance between the care, the justice and the veracity, opening possibilities to overcome the intrinsic distance between teacher and student.

Authored by Wellington Tibério, the article The production of teachers in schools: the System of School Protection and its knowledge/power articulations analyzes under a Foucauldian approach the production of teachers beyond what happens within institutions specialized in the formation of these professionals. For that, it deals with a process that develops on a daily basis from the way in which they live their experience. It is, therefore, an article of a great originality, since it opens up a new perspective of analysis for the theme hitherto debated. If the discussion and understanding of the academic formation of the teacher - of its gaps, difficulties and contradictions - is of great importance to us educators, as already testified by the works described above, this particular dimension of power - in this case, the police power dimension - was still missing in its direct and immediate action. The article discusses the process of judicialization of school relations, which includes not just the teacher, but the pupils and other professionals of education present in the school daily life. Such System of School Protection was instituted by the State of São Paulo in 2009/2010, aiming at "the prevention, mediation and resolution of conflicts within the school environment, with the objective of protecting the physical and patrimonial integrity of pupils, staff and other workers, as well as of equipment and furniture that belong to the state school system, in addition to the dissemination of Civil Defense techniques for the protection of the school community". It is precisely this practical system that the also analyses based on the relation between knowledge and power, a fundamental theme to understand what is public education in contemporary societies. The article is highly stimulating in the sense of leading us to think against the trend, and not just seek easy, localized solutions within the current order, in which managers seem to exist and work only with the purpose of disorganizing everything. The reflection must be structural and philosophical, and this article produced from a fieldwork leads us to just that. Its point of departure is "a kind of overturn of the idea that there would be an ontology of the teaching subject". On the contrary, according to the author, such subject is produced by the conditions in which they work and by the discourses that reach them as professionals of education. Tibério concludes this article with a statement anchored in Michel Foucault, which we reproduce here: "it is not about unveiling our true reality, freeing ourselves of ideological layers that make us take as ours the interests of others, supposedly alien to our own interests, but of distrusting even that which we recognize as our own and true interests. It is, ultimately, about 'refusing what we are'".

The group of articles that follows discusses issues related to youth, their formation and the insertion into the labor market. The first of them, Youth, school and work: permanence and dropout in technical professional education at secondary school level, by Monica Ribeiro da Silva, Lucas Barbosa Pelissari and Allan Andrei Steimbach, deals with the schooling of youngsters, proposing to discuss the reasons that determine the permanence and dropout within technical professional education at secondary school level. The research that originated the work involved pupils at rural technical education and from the area of technology. Both courses are in high demand, one of them displaying a high level of dropout, whereas the other exhibits permanence above average if compared to other secondary schools. In the case of pupils from agricultural schools, the permanence observed results, according to the authors, from positive experiences that youngsters have whilst enrolled in a full-time, well-structured institution, which is capable of representing something important for their lives. The problem would lie in the fact that such schools are exceptions within the Brazilian educational scenario. In schools from technological areas, although they may represent a professionalization in areas with some prestige or guarantee of employment, dropout occurs from the moment the youngster begins to attend the course. From then onwards, "the initial illusions dissolve, problems to keep up with the course show up, and the relation between the school when the youngster remains distant and, therefore, he or she no longer sees reasons to remain at school". The authors highlight the fact that difficulties to reconcile work and study are not the central cause for school dropout. Rather, there are issues of a structural order, mediated by the very organization of the school, that lead the youngster to abandon it.

The next article is also focused on secondary school students and is entitled On the concept of justice: how do students mobilize it in the discussion of moral dilemmas? It is authored by Marcelo Andrade and Luiz Câmara, who try to answer the question in the title based on data obtained in a study with secondary school youngsters, articulating two methodological strategies: focal groups and the resolution of moral dilemmas involving questions of justice and human dignity. The theoretical approach is that of Habermas, especially his conceptions of procedural justice and its attending criteria of equality, equity, reciprocity, and roll exchange. This study puts forward several conclusions, all very stimulating for the understanding of the construction and development of moral judgment among youngsters.

The other articles included in this issue deal with various themes. The first, Educational macro-policies and the school management micro-policy: repercussions on the health of workers, by Kátia Reis de Souza and Brani Rozemberg, discusses the impact of neoliberal management policies on the health of school workers. It includes here teachers, inspectors, and kitchen personnel working during the period of the study, which was carried out in 2007 and involved 12 schools in the State of Rio de Janeiro. The procedure adopted to deal with interviews was based on discourse analysis. The authors conclude that education macro-policies, as well as government measures, have a negative impact upon the health of these professionals, helping to generate illnesses that result in the increased number of sick leaves. Lastly, they propose to bring together workers and managers as an essential step to overcome this situation.

In the article entitled Learning and development of young people and adults: new social practices, new senses, authors Patrícia Guimarães Vargas and Maria de Fátima Cardoso Gomes discuss the influence (positive, according to the research) of the schooling process upon the intellectual and cultural development of pupils in Youngster and Adult Education (EJA) programs. The empirical material for the analysis was found in life history reports and in the reading practices of the students from an initial literacy class of the public municipal system of the city of Belo Horizonte. The theoretical references for the study are Vygotsky's historical-cultural psychology and Paulo Freire's approach to the literacy and conscientization process.

Fábio Hansen authors the article entitled Imaginary formations and their meaning effects in the teaching and learning of publicity creation. It is a reflection about the teaching of publicity creation under the perspective of discourse analysis. The author works with excerpts of discursive sequences produced in 2011 through video recording of classes in the disciplines of Creation, Art Direction, Publicity Writing and Campaign Creation at the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (Higher School of Publicity and Marketing) of Porto Alegre. The text discusses how the teachers' pedagogical discourse is impregnated with the discourse of the publicity market, and highlights the strength that the imaginary about the other (be it the publicity market, fellow teachers, the institute of education or, particularly, the student) has upon the definition of syllabuses and teacher's didactic-pedagogical procedures.

The following article is by Maria Margarida Gomes, Sandra Escovedo Selles and Alice Casimiro Lopes, and is entitled Science curriculum: stability and change in textbooks. Starting from Ivor Goodson's contributions, the work brings to attention the socio-historical trajectory of the curricula of the Sciences discipline, and the interdependence established between the contents of ecology as teaching material and other themes present in textbooks of this discipline. The authors argue that ecology contents are introduced bringing about a change between the 1970s and 1990s, which can be observed in the increased importance attributed to the curriculum integration of teaching contents and to values related to harmony and to the interdependence of nature's components. At the same time, a pattern of stability can be observed in this discipline since it became official following the debates of the Francisco Campos Reform.

The closing article for this issue, Educommunication in music education and its impact on school culture, is authored by Paula Alexandre Reis Bueno, Rosa Maria Cardoso Dalla Costa and Roberto Eduardo Bueno. The analysis focuses on the interrelation between communication and education in situations of teaching-learning of music within the Viva a Escola Program of the State Secretariat for Education of the State of Paraná. This study was developed in the city of Curitiba during the academic year of 2009. The article argues that the necessary interrelation occurs when a work is developed for the "formation of able listeners, critical consumers and autonomous and responsible producers, with approaches from the education for media, from technological mediation in teaching, and from mediation in communicative management". The research concludes that, although educommunication has found a place adequate for its development, such situation did not come about in an intentional, planned and systematic manner, so as to establish a process of teaching-learning of music in harmony with the new human sensibilities in a society conditioned by the technologies of information and communication.

The last section brings an interview of great interest conducted in 2012 by Teresa Cristina Rego and Elizabeth dos Santos Braga with Spaniard teacher and researcher Pablo del Rio, who speaks about his studies on the life and work of Lev Vygotsky, and about his more recent research in the field of neurogenesis. He also talks about the difficulties with which scientific research is faced today, pointing out the presence of dogmatisms that hinder the dialogue and the fertile debate among distinct theoretical perspectives. Additionally, he highlights the existence of a policy in the scientific field based on a logic that is extrinsic to it, that is to say, that privileges the reiteration of the already-given and the amount of articles published in detriment to the doubt as the propeller of development in science, and to the autonomous use of time, conditions that respect the demands of scientific creation, a basic element to the development of science itself.

I conclude this editorial by bidding farewell to the readers of Education and Research as a member of the editorial team that I have integrated since 2004. The post-of editor which I have held between 2007 and 2011 has allowed me to observe the changes that have taken place in the editorial field, which have been many and profound. I believe that the journal has managed to keep up with them, creating working conditions and ways of acting more appropriate to this new moment. Our proposal of a guided call for papers is one of those effects, allowing us to contribute more effectively to the educational debate. I would like to thank the authors that have entrusted us with the results of their studies and researches, to the invaluable help of our support staff, to the professionals that have worked as reviewers and translators of the published articles, and also to the Dean of the Faculty of Education who demonstrated cooperation and solidarity throughout these years.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  23 May 2013
• Date of issue
  June 2013