Concepções de professoras/es sobre a psicologia escolar na educação básica moçambicana: uma análise à luz da psicologia escolar na perspectiva crítica

Abstract

The characteristics of Mozambique’s economic, sociocultural and historical contexts represents a central role in the daily lives of the population and greatly influence the country’s schooling process. The lack of a law requiring the presence of psychologists in Mozambican basic education and the countless hardships experienced by students, teachers, and society in general motivated the development of this research. Among these hardships, the following stand out: violence, lack of motivation to study, truancy, hunger, political conflicts, environmental disasters such as frequent cyclones that cause partial or complete destruction of schools, and child labor to cope with family poverty. Given this scenario, the present research was developed, whose general objective is to investigate the role and relevance of School Psychology in Mozambican basic education, based on teachers’ conceptions and the country’s socio-educational context. Therefore, a search was initially conducted in the following databases: Capes Journals, SciELO, LILACS, PKP index and Google Schoolar for works published between 2000 and 2023 using the combined keywords: School and Educational Psychology, psychologist's role and Mozambique, resulting in 23 texts, including 22 paper and 1 thesis. We selected the thesis for analysis because it was the only one that included the keywords that guided our search. This survey resulted in a book chapter, entitled “School and Educational Psychology in Mozambique: Current Challenges”, which will comprise the first part of this dissertation. Furthermore, the work also presents a bibliographic survey of Mozambican scientific production in the field of School and Educational Psychology, published between 2000 and 2023 in indexed national and international journals, as well as in repositories of Mozambique’s Public Higher Education Institutions. The second part will be presented in the form of an article, considering that the role of Psychology in schools is underdeveloped and permeated by challenges related to schooling, in addition to the gap in the Law. Therefore, the article entitled “Teachers' Conceptions of School Psychology in Mozambican Schools: An Analysis in Light of School Psychology from a Critical Perspective” was developed based on a survey whose objective was to analyze teachers’ conceptions of School Psychology in Mozambican schools. This is a qualitative study, based on a questionnaire online with open-ended and closed-ended questions, addressed to teachers at a public elementary school in Mozambique. The analysis of the empirical material from the questionnaire was inspired by Bardin content analysis (CA) and highlighted four thematic categories: “Conceptions about School Psychology”, “Understanding the Teaching and Learning Process”, “Pathologization of Difficulties in the Schooling Process” and “The Role of the School Psychologist”. We concluded that the teachers’ conceptions of School Psychology are biased toward the individualization and pathologization of behaviors, as well as toward assigning social work tasks to school psychologists. The study allowed us to reflect on what kind of School Psychology is expected in basic education in Mozambique, without neglecting the numerous challenges faced by psychologists in their integration and performance in this context. It was also clear that the field in question is still new and somewhat “raw,” needing to be refined in accordance with the country’s realities.