Como as escolas atuam no reforço escolar? Significações da/para a política curricular de Niterói

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate meanings for actions called “school reinforcement”, understood in this study as a discursively articulated and hegemonized demand in different contexts of production of curricular policy in the Municipal Education Network of Niterói. The interest in this theme arises as an outcome of the investigations initiated in the Master's degree, which had as a privileged locus the monitoring of the School Reinforcement Project for the initial years of Elementary Education in the aforementioned network, starting in 2015. Initially, the focus is on discursive productions about actions proposed in normative texts that are made available to school units through the Municipal Department of Education, were geared towards “reinforcing” student learning via curricular proposals that would occur in parallel with regular teaching work in classes (same shift), being justified by their intention to promote “improvements in the quality” of educational processes. Since each school year the guidelines for organizing extra tutoring in school units could take on other configurations, the empirical work that makes up this investigation is divided into two distinct moments: ina first moment, based on the analysis of excerpts from texts in guiding documents, in addition to political speeches made available by print and digital media, linked to municipal and education management, which reinforced arguments about the need and positivity of such actions; in a second moment, through the conduct of interviews-conversations, seeking to access the discursive production of actors who acted/act in the context of practices in the role of pedagogues, organizing, guiding and monitoring the development of school reinforcement actions for students in the initial years. Given the instability of meanings for reinforcement that were articulated discursively, thus producing other demands for curricular policy in the Network studied, the theoretical-investigative path begins based on Laclau and Mouffe's Discourse Theory, investigating the meanings of political-discursive categories, such as demand, articulation, hegemony and empty signifier. Subsequently, by casting doubt on the notion of normative prescription and closure of meaning for these actions and projects, whose “effectiveness” was contingently justified based on the results obtained by students’ performance in large-scale assessments, it also operates in line with the theory of enactment by Stephen Ball, Meg Maguire and Annette Braun, with theoretical-strategic support from the studies and research by Lopes, Macedo and Dias, related to the field of Curriculum and/or Teaching Policies. I argue that the combination of these articulated references provides an opportunity to access, in order to understand, the plurality of senses and meanings materialized in different actions on school reinforcement propositions, thus contributing to problematizing curricular policies that project and aim for measurable results for schools.