Education and Democracy by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Education, General
ISBN: 9780813366289
Google: 6tSbswEACAAJ
Goodreads: 388461
Publisher: Westview Press
Published: 1998-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

Students and the Inter Project

The radical changes in curriculum and teachers' practice necessarily implied new ways of being a student in the Popular Public School. True to Freire's vision of the learner as subject and object of the knowledge production process, the PT-MSE envisioned a more active and critical role for students at all levels in the system. This concern was strengthened after analyzing student opinions collected in a survey conducted by the Secretariat to understand the "vision of the students" with regard to the reality of the schools. Students throughout the municipal school system offered a negative assessment of the physical facilities of most schools, reporting that they were "poorly maintained," "ugly," "dirty," "marked with graffiti," "infested with rats," "with out light," "with out water," "with broken windows and chairs," "with bathrooms in the worse of conditions and in insufficient numbers."20

The Secretariat's report summarizing the students' assessment of their schools points out that the students' comments seemed to distance themselves from the negative reality they described, as though they did not take responsibility for the physical conditions of the schools. This attitude is attributed to the manner in which the institutional culture of the public school in Brazil perpetuates a "crystallized" view of the role and functions of the individuals who make up the school community: "the student dirties, the servant cleans and the teacher lectures, the students attends, etc."21 One of the objectives of the Secretariat through the Movement for the Reorientation of the Curriculum was to break down the rigid roles played out by students, teachers and administrators and to lessen the separateness of the school and the community outside its walls. Through such an initial problematization of the reality of the school, the Secretariat intended that new approaches to their solution be envisioned and more collaborative efforts to improve the physical and curricular structure of the school carried out. In the words of the administration: "it is breaking the 'culture of silence', and hearing out the students, discussing with them their visions and remaining open to the reflection and action that can effectively create a perspective that leads to the construction of a public democratic school."22

This was precisely the intent of the Inter Project: to change the culture of the classroom from primarily teacher-centered and driven by a preestablished curriculum, to one in which the teacher and student engage in a mutual exchange of knowledge and experiences around situations and topics derived from their socio-cultural reality. In this way learning becomes a dialogic and dynamic enterprise aimed at the construction of new knowledge, at building bridges between common sense notions and popular knowledge that children bring with them into the classroom and the academic content areas to be taught. In this regard the Inter Project introduces the generative theme as the mediating factor in this process of knowledge exchange. It provides a kind of unifying focus in the struggle for the educator to find nexuses with specific areas of knowledge and an equilibrium between the general and the specific in an otherwise free-flowing dialogue.

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