-
Representations; 6th year; School; Relationship with knowledge.
This research investigated the representations of 6th and 7th year students about school and their relationship with school knowledge. Carried out at Escola Municipal Professora Francisca Ferreira da Silva, in Natal – RN, the research aimed to analyze the representations that 6th and 7th year students had about the school, school knowledge and their teachers, analyzing how they all relate to each other. they intertwined and had a direct impact on the relationship that the subjects maintained with the school and school knowledge. Based on a socio-historical perspective, we draw on Chartier (1990) from his concepts of representations, practices and appropriation, and on Charlot (2000) through the notions of the Relationship with Knowledge and its basic elements such as: desire, meaning, mobilization, figures of learning and identity and epistemic relationships with knowledge. Supported by the principles of the qualitative approach, we adopted the questionnaire and semi-structured interview as methodological procedures. The data showed that in a multiplicity of senses, the school represents a means of access to the future and socio-professional insertion, at the same time as it constitutes an important space of sociability for youth and, contradictorily, a space of exclusion marked by different forms of violence and demobilization. In accordance with such representations, school knowledge, in the figure of learning, assumes the status of a commodity to meet a classificatory evaluative logic, in a relationship in which one learns to get good grades, pass the year and reach the idealized future and as a related mode of social insertion to its use in everyday social practices, increasingly distancing itself from the social function of the school as a place of knowledge, intellectual formation and critical and human development of subjects. The representations about teachers revealed the practices that fueled those inadequate appropriation processes. The mediating teachers established factors for mobilization and monitoring of learning, but they came up against a practice based on the transmission of decontextualized information, reinforcing the sense of knowledge as necessary to serve, as a priority, the evaluation process. Authoritarian teachers, in turn, drastically deepened this meaning, configuring themselves as agents of exclusion and demobilization of students, adopting inadequate postures and theoretical-methodological uncertainties that directly affected the relationships that subjects maintained with the school and school knowledge. The research demonstrated the urgency in rescuing the meaning of school based on an anthropological perspective, in which the processes of learning and teaching must be based on the intellectual formation and humanization of subjects.