Grêmio estudantil: quais sentidos na atualidade?

Abstract

This dissertation is linked to the Study Group on Difference and Inequality in Youth School Education (DDEEJ), coordinated by Professor Miriam Soares Leite, from the Graduate Program in Education at the State University of Rio de Janeiro / PROPED-UERJ, within the scope of research on youth political participation developed by the Group. Based on the notion of plural youth/juventudes, as proposed by Juarez Dayrell and Paulo Carrano, and the contextualized studies of youth, by José Machado Pais, as well as the discussions on democracy, by Jacques Rancière, democratic person and democracy at school, with Hanna Arendt and Gert Biesta, Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, we investigated possible answers to the central question of this qualitative study: what meanings can the student union assume in view of the various forms of youth movements that are emerging today? This issue was addressed through the development of a case study, which focused on the student union/grêmio of a State College located in the city of Itaboraí, a municipality in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro. To this end, a documentary research was carried out, considering the records of the entity in question in the offline and online domains, addressed under the precepts of the Content Analysis methodology, according to Laurence Bardin. The results show that the student body studied did not have a strictly local activity and that it was also connected with broader issues of society, presenting a profile not only of assistance, but also politically challenging. The relations established between the student union and the spheres of power, both of the school and of the State Department of Education, signaled a possible attempt by the higher power spheres to subordinate the student entity, not identifying institutional strategies for joint deliberation nor space for initiatives coming from the student entity. Finally, we identified more than one enunciation of the notion of youth in the context of this case study: approaching to the discourse of youth protagonism by the Department of Education, and romanticization of the political participation of young people, in which the revolutionary character is understood as a youth condition, by the students of the guild/grêmio. The research also concludes that, despite the importance attributed by government agencies to the existence of a student union in schools and also acknowledging that these entities actually have a role of student representation, even triggering a desire for youth political participation, their presence does not guarantee a space for democratic deliberation and can assume meanings that approach formality, the myth of the young revolutionary and/or institutional sulbaternization - it is, above all, an entity in dispute.