Jovens, RPG e redes de sociabilidade: muito prazer em conhecer!

Abstract

Based on my own experience, that has led me to perceptions of a lack of motivation among young people towards the curricular knowledge as it is presented by most schools, this study establishes a correlation between this lack of motivation and, on the other hand, the commitment that they show towards seeking knowledge for the improvement of their roleplaying game sessions, highlighting how much the group seems to be important to them. The research – carried out with a group of Brazilian High School and University students - first done in person, and then through online conversations – has had a fundamental role in elucidating how their interest grows as they connect in a interdisciplinary way, through social networks, the game plots with knowledges that, more often than not, they don’t get interested in at school, but end up gaining meaning and purpose to them in the game context. Reflections are proposed on how young RPG players produce knowledge, what ways of sociability are present in these experiences and how this “art of playing”, fundamental element of human experience, can point to methodologies that allow young people, and their teachers, to find great pleasure in teaching-learning. The ongoings of the field research could be explored based on the theoretical contributions of Gilles Brougère and Johan Huizinga to think about playful culture, Lev Vygotsky to correlate game to human development, the epistemology of human sciences by Mikhail Bakhtin and the social-historical approach of research proposed by Lucia Rabello de Castro and Maria Tereza de Assunção Freitas, the concept of youth as told by José Machado Pais, Juarez Dayrell and Paulo Carrano, Silvio Gallo's concept of rhizomatic knowledge, Nilda Alves’ knowledge networks, among other. The study shows that it would be possible for teachers, by observing the relations that young people establish with knowledge and among each other, through the RPG, to transform the school into a more fruitful place for teaching ang learning.