Políticas de ensino e alfabetização: disputas, materiais didáticos e processos de subjetivação

Abstract

This thesis discusses the development of the National Literacy Policy (BRASIL, 2019) of Jair Bolsonaro’s government in Rio de Janeiro’s Public Municipal education system. The policy has instituted the phonic method of written-language teaching – which has the phoneme, an abstract unity devoid of meaning, as its starting point – as the literacy process of students from all public schools in national territory. The policy is composed of several measures aimed at: the acquisition of learning material based on the phonic method through the Programa Nacional do Livro e do Material Didático [National Textbook and Learning Material Program] (PNLD); the training of teachers aimed at the use of such material; a large-scale evaluation of students; the awarding of teachers based on their students’ results; the distribution of public funds to federative entities who adhere to the policy. In the school year of 2019, under the government of Mayor Marcelo Crivella, the Public Municipal education system has acquired learning materials from a private institute that adopts the phonic method, thus following the federal government’s National Literacy Policy. Furthermore, the same education system develops its own learning material through a different – albeit equally restrictive – literacy method that takes the text, not the phoneme, as its starting point. We have, therefore, identified a dispute between literacy methods in Rio de Janeiro’s Public Municipal education system, specifically, it is worth noting, when it comes to teaching children. This dispute is fueled by distinct education policies, a federal one and a municipal one, and updates historical conflicts between literacy methods (MORTATTI, 2009; 2019a; 2019b; 2019c). Through enunciations found in these learning materials – both the ones developed by the municipal education system, and the ones it has bought, following Jair Bolsonaro government’s National Literacy Policy – we intend on denaturalizing the primer and the literacy textbook, both aimed at children, as well as the manuals aimed at teachers. For this purpose, we discuss: the different conceptions of language underlying the material; the imagery of teachers and of children that they construct (ARANTES, 2018); the forms of control over knowledge, practices, gestures and discourse enacted by this material, which operates as an apparatus that propagates policies and prescriptions (ARANTES, 2018; FOUCAULT, 2019b; AGAMBEN, 2009); the disciplining of knowledge (FOUCAULT, 2010; ARANTES, 2018) that orients the production of such material; and the notion of scenography (MAINGUENEAU, 2004; 2015) as a linguistic resource through which the adhesion of teachers and children is sought. Furthermore, we defend a discursive perspective of language, having French Discourse Analysis as foundation. Thus, we believe that to say is to interact, to dialogue, to construct subjectivities, to act, to intervene and to produce something in the world (BAKHTIN/ VOLÓCHINOV, 2017; FOUCAULT, 2019; ROCHA, 2014). Thus, we refuse, as does Professor Paulo Freire (1980; 1996), the accommodation and the inexorability of the future, as well as market and neoliberal interests that flatten subjects and produce subjectivities in bulk, stifled in their critical and creative thinking as well as in their possibilities of acting upon the world and producing other possible worlds (SOARES; MIRANDA, 2009).