Representações sociais da deficiência mental: o senso comum enquanto espaço de resistência à inclusão do aluno com deficiência na escola

Abstract

Mental deficiency is marked by stigmas supported by social values that led the mentally disabled to different types of abuse and exclusion. Christianity brought an assisting view, the bourgeois revolution spread the unproductive ideology and with the advance of medicine, mental deficiency started to be seen as a clinical problem, funding the notions of abnormality and deviation. The schoolwork of these students was segregated until nowadays: after the paradigm of integration, the inclusion proposal developed, meaning a school for all, without distinction. The objective of the present study was to understand social representation of teachers about mental deficiency and how these representations shape an obstruction for inclusion of the disabled student in schools. The research was developed employing questionnaire and half-structured interview to 25 elementary school teachers of the Institute of Education of Rio de Janeiro State. The interviews were studied utilizing the technique of thematic content analyzes, seeking for representative content verbalized. The following categories came according to the analysis: mental deficiency and its meanings; the school and the right place for the mentally disabled; mental deficiency representation and pedagogical action. Deepening the teachers’ social representations is possible to conclude that they mean a blockage to the inclusion of mentally disabled students, which are still excluded in the interior of schools.