As Demandas Curriculares das Ocupações na Cidade do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

The first half Luis Fernando “Pezão”’s term – governor of the State of Rio de Janeiro from 2014-2018 – witnessed the occupation of a number of public schools by their students. This organic movement, constantly adopting a horizontal mode of organization, started as a response to an unprecedented budget cut forced upon the Public Education by the State government. Later, the movement, which was consisted only of students, was integrated by other political groups. Such incorporation resulted in a dispute of narratives around what is to be considered quality when it comes to Education. The following PhD dissertation aims at interpreting those educational and curricular demands based on the discursive production of the different agents involved in the aforementioned movement. The corpus used for the development of this research included: a) semistructured interviews with students who belonged to four different occupation movements (Occupy Cairu, Occupy Compositor, Occupy Paulo Freire, and Occupy Mendes); b) posts from Facebook pages dedicated to those groups where memories and information about them were gathered; c) articles from alternative media websites, which allows a non-establishment version of the facts; d) semistructured interviews with leaders from SEPE (Teacher’s union) and FAETEC (a public vocational school in Rio de Janeiro), whose demands were merged with the occupy movement, that at a certain moment started to be called “Occupy Everywhere”. The theoretical framework used to interpret the corpus included Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Discourse Theory and the studies developed by the Politics of Curriculum and Culture research group, coordinated by Dr. Alice Casimiro Lopes, particularly notions of Curriculum Politics, Demands, Discourse, and Antagonism. It was possible to conclude that the occupy movement which occurred at the public schools in Rio de Janeiro originated two different discourses: one belonging to the students and one belonging to the former governor. Those discourses dispute in order to determine what is quality when it comes to formal education. After the demands of the occupy schools movement were enunciated, the civil society became more aware of them and started to debate on educational and curricular politics. Also, they showed how the definition of quality can vary when it comes to antagonists views and projects of Education such as it is possible to see it in the case of the occupy movement and the Government of Rio de Janeiro.