Professor Ariano Suassuna: a escrita e a prática de um pensamento educacional para o “Brasil real”

Abstract

This work is configured as a reflection on the contribution of Ariano Suassuna, poet, playwright, university professor, essayist, novelist and artist, to Brazilian Education, developed in the social and political space that Machado de Assis called “Real Brazil”. Suassuna taught for more than thirty years at the Federal University of Pernambuco, in the Chairs of Aesthetics, Philosophy, Theater Theory, Brazilian Literature and History of Brazilian Culture, always applying the literary art with social sciences. During his teaching, he coordinated several cultural departments at UFPE and produced vast didactic material to be used by his students, at a time of editorial scarcity in this area. He was Secretary of Education and Culture of Recife, in the 1970s, and later Secretary of Culture in the state governments of Miguel Arraes (1995-1998 - PSB) and Eduardo Campos (2007-2010- 2014 - PSB), when he made use of educational policies for carry out various cultural projects aimed at the peripheral people of the cities of Pernambuco and, in particular, the agreste. The research problem was established from the question arising from the absence of the registration of his name as an educator, in the annals of the History of Education. Seeking to focus on the social relevance of its teaching production, inside and outside the traditional locus of the classroom, this thesis is characterized as a production of knowledge in the humanities, focused on the field of Education, inserted in the paradigm of qualitative nature and developing largely through bibliographic research and document analysis. It presents its foundation in the context of the History of Education, composing its theoretical framework from the analysis and interpretation of the information and data obtained, through the concepts and notions of thinkers and agents in this area, establishing as categories of analysis culture, education, identity, memory and teaching profession. It is also based on biographical studies to identify and map the resonances and epiphanies experienced by my research object that guided his career in teaching. The study of Suassuna's professional trajectory will also receive the contribution of oral history methodology, through interviews with people of his family and his network of sociability in the fields of Education and Culture. The choice of the theme is justified by the importance of its educational practice, founded and developed in the concern with the construction of knowledge and the valorization of the identity of the Brazilian people, inferring education as a phenomenon of inclusion of social minorities.