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Knowledge specialization in school: state intervention in specific fields of knowledge

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how specific educational programs related to the knowledge of Natural Sciences are implemented in Buenos Aires elementary schools. Programs, together with new speeches and practices, are introduced by people with new teaching functions and higher degrees of specialization than current classroom teachers. This study deals with how the penetration of this specialization affects school life and focuses on the conflicts involved in the incorporation of specialist teachers. These findings are part of an ethnographic approach research. The description is based on the network of relationships among all the people in charge of teaching, the consideration of their perspectives and the meanings given to different dimensions that form part of the practical logic of school order. These led to place the focus of analysis on the irruption caused on the historical positions linked to knowledge. As a result of this commotion of everyday school life, there is a reordering based on a process of differentiation that ends up installing the idea that teachers no longer carry the knowledge that historically legitimized their position. Its pedagogical authority is blurred. This issue affects and modulates the links established with knowledge in school.

Educational programs; Knowledge; Specialization; Science teaching; Ethnography

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