Vivências e compreensões de professores do ensino fundamental acerca de aspectos políticos que incidem sobre seu trabalho

Abstract

Based on the understanding that the issues that affect education are reproductions of broader social problems, this study aims to investigate political aspects related to the experiences, understandings and practices of elementary school teachers, considering the context of neoliberal rationality. The theoretical basis comes from the propositions of Dardot and Laval about neoliberalism, understood not only as an ideology, economic policy or as a facet of current capitalism, but fundamentally as a rationality that shapes our subjectivities and governs everyone. We also rely on the Social Psychology of Work, which questions the current work model and seeks to understand it from the workers' experience. As for the method, it is a qualitative research carried out through a case study, the study location was a municipal school. As techniques, participant observations were carried out in the school, the writing of a field diary, and semi-structured interviews with five elementary school teachers; the interviews occurred during the pandemic caused by COVID-19 and, therefore, were carried out remotely. The data analysis process was carried out through the transcription of the interviews, fluctuating and detailed readings of the transcripts and the field diary, prior categorization of the data and, finally, the construction of meaning categories, with the identification of four main categories, being 1) the conceptions of education presented by teachers, 2) political aspects, such as public educational policies, policy influence on education issues and political manifestations of teachers, 3) experiences of overload and illness related to the organization of work, 4) coping tactics used to deal with the problems presented in the previous categories. As main results, it was found that 1) teachers understand education in its broad character and attribute to education the role of developing students' critical awareness. However, there is a contradiction between the discourse and its actual practices, some of which are based on meritocratic logic and which help to reproduce relations of oppression; 2) teachers have a critical view of social issues that permeate education, and are attentive to political issues, such as bills that affect their work; 3) neoliberal rationality and business logic enter the educational process and materialize in educational public policies, with the proposal of standardized curricula and assessments, formulated from private interests, with the purpose of developing skills and competences in students; 4) teachers point out the precariousness of teaching work, the overload, exacerbated demands, experiences of suffering and illness, showing that the neoliberal rationality also affects the organization of work; 5) such problems were aggravated in the context of pandemics and remote teaching, as teachers needed to individually adapt to new demands, without institutional or government support, and experienced greater levels of overload and suffering; 6) facing this, teachers use individual tactics to get around the problems, collective ways of coping were not mentioned. It is concluded that basic education, educational policies and the organization of teaching work are captured by the neoliberal rationality, which inserts the business logic into the school and makes the subjects start to live on such precepts.