Banca de DEFESA: JULIE ISABELLE FREITAS RODRIGUES

THE MEDICALIZING DISCOURSE OF ADHD AND ITS IMPLICATIONS IN THE TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS

Medicalization of education; Teaching and Learning Processes; Historical-Cultural Theory

The medicalization of education is inserted in the larger context of the medicalization of life,

 which is configured as the transformation of human characteristics, such as suffering, 

behavior and inattention, into pathologies and, following the logic of the discourses present in society, 

the school has approached medical concepts and adopted medicalizing practices for pedagogical issues. 

The contributions of Historical-Cultural Theory (THC) are relevant to this study, in order to expand the understanding

 of man beyond the biological and maturational perspective, understanding the social environment as an essential 

pillar in the construction of identity and learning. In this sense, the school plays a fundamental role in this 

construction, whether for the purpose of presenting socially constructed knowledge to students or through 

mediation in the development of their higher psychological functions, (FPS) such as memory and attention. 

In view of the above, this research is organized with the general objective of identifying in the speech of students 

diagnosed with ADHD the perception about the mediations that facilitate their learning process with a view to 

problematizing the medicalization of pedagogical processes and as specific objectives: to know the understanding 

of students diagnosed with ADHD enrolled at the institution about their teaching-learning process and discuss with

 the students the support possibilities offered by the educational institution. The emphasis on the discussion of 

ADHD is justified by the fact that it is considered, by critical authors, where the medicalization of education 

materializes. The main contradictions highlighted are linked to the diagnosis itself, due to the superficiality of the 

clinical assessment, without there being knowledge of the entire context experienced by the subjects.

As it is a professional master's degree, the product to be generated will consist of a digital booklet aimed at the 

institution's teachers, whose content will cover the topic of demedicalization of education and its relationship 

with learning, from the students' perspective. The research is qualitative in nature, as it will analyze a 

phenomenon that, if quantified, will not be able to contemplate the planned data production. 

As for technical procedures, it is a bibliographical research and action research. Data analysis will be supported 

by the historical-dialectic materialist method, investigating the totality of the reality of the subjects and the 

data presented, observing their contradictions, which are admitted by the method and the dichotomy that 

separates the subject from the object.