O Programa Nacional do Livro Didático como produto de interesses políticos, econômicos e pedagógicos : um estudo sobre os livros digitais de química

Abstract

In a global movement, public education is being privatized to the extent that business conglomerates influence and lead to the development of educational policies. In this context, the National Textbook Program (PNLD) stands out in Brazilian educational policy due to the universal access of students and teachers from public schools belonging to basic education, to textbooks evaluated by specialists based on politicalpedagogical criteria, considering the coherence between theoretical-methodological approaches and the didactic-pedagogical proposals. The amount of books that the Federal Government buys to serve the Program makes it the largest customer of the publishers, moving financial resources that exceed US$ 260 million per year, attracting the economic interest of different business groups to the publishing market. Factors such as the evolution of the printed book for the digital environment, the inclusion of technologies in school education - for example, computers with software or applications of pedagogical intentionality - fomented by public policies, contributed to the possibility of digital textbooks in PNLD. Thus, the research sought to answer the following problem: How did the insertion of the option for digital books take place in the official PNLD 2015 document? The investigation considered possible business, academic and pedagogical influences in the trajectory of the production of the political text referring to the digital books, in particular, those of Chemistry. As a theoreticalmethodological reference, we use the Cycle Policy approach, a conceptual framework proposed by Ball, Bowe and Gold, in which the authors assume the existence of three timeless contexts in the production of policies: influence, text production and of practice. This approach led us to analyze educational public policy by looking at it from a variety of perspectives, including business interests, government intentions, the role of textbook authors, the participation of teachers, publishers and researchers, actors who are interrelated and make it possible to restructure the book program to each edict. For the production of data, we used the analysis of documents and semistructured interviews. From the results, we show that the inclusion of digital textbooks in the PNLD was a political decision based mainly on business interests, disregarding other issues, such as the training of teachers in the use of digital technologies and school infrastructure to support these resources. As an implication of this decision, the digital book not implemented in schools, since the Ministry of Education did not acquire this product. Also, that the policy of textbooks is poorly understood by actors who practice it, among them, teachers.