A construção da imagem social da criança no diálogo com a Avaliação Nacional da Alfabetização

Abstract

This study aims to understand how the school sets up the construction of the social image of the child based on the quality in education discourse in dialogue with the National Literacy Assessment - ANA. The assumption that guides this investigation understands that children are active subjects of rights and the school is a privileged space to guarantee both his civic education and, consequently, his civic visibility. However, the question is that standardized and large-scale assessments, as ANA, have taken effect on children's lives and not just results. The theoretical and methodological basis of this research is the cultural-historical theory (VIGOTSKI, 1996, 2006, 2009, 2010), the discussion on the process of education of the child according with Gimeno Sacristán (2005), Paulo Freire (1987) and Gauthier and Tardif (2010) and childhood studies located in the field of Social sciences which understand the child as agent, social actor and producer of culture (Qvortrup, 1994, 2000; James & Prout, 1997; Jenks, James & Prout, 1998; Prout, 2005; and Corsaro, 1997; Sarmento 2007). To analyze the relationship between the quality in education policy making contexts to the micro dimension of a school, the research was guided by the political cycle approach formulated by Ball and Bowe (1992, 1994), the relationship between the children civic visibility and the policy based on the propositions of Arendt (1968, 2009) Qvortrup (2010; 2014) and Sarmento (2007). The concept of quality in education followed the propositions of Dahlberg, Moss & Think (1999), Bondioli (2004), Urban et al (2012) Morgado (2005), Freitas (2005, 2014) and Oliveira (2009). Being a study that highlights the significance of children, it was decided by the ethnographic methodology to approach the forms of communication of a group of children between eight and nine years old which participated of ANA at the end of 2014 and belonged to the public elementar school in Cuiaba-MT. Therefore, the methodological approach involves the reflection about the international and national policy that guides and defines quality in education from the analysis of two specialist teachers, official documents as well as the media discourse that presents to society the ranking of schools associated with the discourse of educational quality. As a result, the survey identified the coexistence of two paradigms that influence the educational system: a reproductive one and a creative one. The reproductive paradigm has political and financial strength woven by our shared territories in standardization, homogenization and production that contributes to the deepening of the social image of the child as a student either obedient and disciplined or rebellious. On the other hand, another paradigm is also present in the school’s routine, named by this research as creative and although surviving from independent initiatives of the hegemonic system and strongly linked to the academic world, it presents an opposite student image, linking the school child also as learner, creative, active, social actor and producer of culture. Finally, the study found that the effect of ANA in the context of the practice contributes to the design of two meaningful cores: one that is anchored in the image of the student as a scapegoat which blams the child for the failure in scoring, and the other is the learning child who shows the need to create an assessment under a different paradigm, immersed in the reality and conducted by an anthropological approach.