Select Field or Degree Concentration for description.
Education
Education is a core element of a human being’s constitution and comprises the social formation processes involved in gaining access to a group’s culture and to ways of being, acting and reflecting. Educational processes and practices occur intentionally or not in different socialization settings. Education happens in relationships between human beings with the goal of forming individuals and it is tied to the civilization process. Starting at the modern era, schools have concentrated the social responsibility to form subjects so as to ensure their participation in the productive system as well as in public life. Educational action presupposes a specific set of conceptions about what is to be human, and such conceptions vary according to social and historical contexts. Education is also related to culture, to values shared by human groups and communities. Education transmits, perpetuates and changes the human experience of culture through the teaching and learning relationship.
Concentration 1: Education, Inequality, Difference and Inclusion
Research projects developed in this concentration focus on the singular and collective aspects of the configuration of subjects involved in a broad variety of educational contexts, especially students, teachers and family members facing the challenges of inclusive educational practices and affirmative action. We work towards constantly denaturalizing personal and collective asymmetries in order to shed light on how the very same dynamics that constitute students also determine “non-students”. We focus primarily on subjects who are permanently discredited, seen as unfit for/unable to manage institutional socialization. Those subjects express untamed, irrepressible aspects of human nature and pose a challenge to the enlightenment process, thereby exposing its frailty. The experience of diversity in school education is permeated by performance evaluations and by a partiality towards intellectual and bodily achievements that stems from our society’s ideal of a productive and competitive man. Therefore, this degree concentration focuses on the social construction of difference, normalizations and norms, but also on exclusionary dynamics, on conduct strategies and on the production of differences and singularities, including those related to ethnicity/race and gender. Studies developed in this concentration may approach human diversity using the analytical toolsets from Anthropology, Sociology, Philosophy, Historic-Cultural Psychology and Critical Theory, thus employing theoretical approaches that acknowledge inequality and difference as a core element of the production of social controls and violence that takes on various and complex forms. As a counterpoint to such controls, this degree concentration calls upon the body of knowledge on the construction mechanisms of difference-based individual and collective identities. We also seek to identify the power and knowledge relationships present in the processes that award certain groups the argumentative and prescriptive authority to define “the difference of the diverse” and institutionalize practices and knowledges that reduce the impact of inclusive action by means of strategies that pathologize certain behaviors and categorize certain bodily configurations and intellectual particularities as “less-than”. Therefore, this degree concentration gathers analytical efforts to understand the mechanisms of social and personal disadvantages present in educational inclusion processes, trying to identify in each case the specificities of the mutual dependence between social production of inequality and the configuration of individual diversity.
Advisors
Alexandre Filordi de Carvalho
Daniel Revah
Daniela Finco
Edna Martins
Ellen Gonzaga Lima Souza
Marcos Cezar de Freitas
Marian Ávila de Lima e Dias
Concentration 2: Education, State, Work
This degree concentration is structured around the belief that in order to study the school, the politics and social relationships that shape institutional education, it is necessary to reflect on the broad categories that play a part in human formation, such as work, culture, economics, education and the State as one possibility for contemporary social organization. Therefore, this concentration encompasses research of different theoretical, epistemological and methodological approaches on the relationships between Work, State and Education, using the theoretical frameworks of disciplines such as Social, Political and Economic Sciences, as well as History. This concentration welcomes research on the implementation and evaluation of educational public policies; on international educational policy and reforms; on policy pertaining to syllabi and educational evaluation; and finally, on the work conditions faced by teachers and educational management professionals. This concentration is structured around the right to education, educational democratization and the interfacing between educational policy and practices.
Advisors
Ana Paula Santiago do Nascimento
Celia Maria Benedicto Giglio
Claudia Barcelos de Moura Abreu
Débora Cristina Goulart
Luiz Carlos Novaes
Márcia Aparecida Jacomini
Maria Angélica Pedra Minhoto
Concentration 3: Public Schools, Teacher Formation and Pedagogical Practices
Research developed in this concentration focuses on public schools as an element of social change and on the emancipatory possibilities of school knowledge as it relates to (also emancipatory) teaching staff formative processes – bachelor’s courses and continuing professional development – reflecting specifically on how teachers’ formation comes to play into their pedagogical practices. We aim to analyze the relationships between public policies, teacher formation programs and pedagogical practices by means of research on the formation and professional activities of teachers and educationalists involved in K-12 and higher education. Such research problematizes the following aspects: the constitution of a teaching identity; entering the job market; professional development; the approach of socioeconomic class, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality. This degree concentration is founded on the understanding that pedagogical actions are situated theoretical-practical activities shaped by the material conditions of those involved, in particular the conditions pertaining to their lives and work.
Advisors
Isabel Melero Bello
Itale Luciane Cericato
Jorge Luiz Barcellos da Silva
Magali Aparecida Silvestre
Umberto de Andrade Pinto
Concentration 4: History of Education: Subjects, Objects and Practices
As the result of a comprehensive and thorough review of education historiography, Brazilian Education History studies have undergone a significant change since the 1990s. The field has grown to include new research objects and approaches, and existing topics have been reshaped by the profitable exchanges between education historians and contemporary historiographic studies. In line with that reconfiguration, this degree concentration encompasses educational research that approaches historically the educational processes that take place both in and outside schools, using the theoretical frameworks provided by History, Philosophy and Social Sciences to discuss regional matters considering the national and international theoretical debate. We foster research on the following topics: (a) institutions (school, academia etc.); teacher and student formation; educational policy, practices and cultures (subjects, spaces, temporalities, knowledges, syllabi, school and academic disciplines, architecture and furniture); (b) Education intellectuals; (c) national and international processes of production, circulation and appropriation of pedagogical models and standards that influence (i) educational practices, (ii) temporal and spatial organization of schools and (iii) the establishment of memories (textbooks, pedagogical literature, press, educational press, education journals, literature etc.). Our preferred approach to those topics makes use of concepts and research procedures borrowed from Cultural History, Intellectual History and History of intellectuals, as well as New Political History.
Advisors
Claudia Panizzolo
Fernando Rodrigues de Oliveira
Regina Cândida Ellero Gualtieri
Renata Marcílio Cândido
Wagner Rodrigues Valente
Concentration 5: Languages and Knowledges in Formative Contexts
This degree concentration focuses on the production of contemporary social actors, especially its epistemological aspects related to teaching and learning. We aim to critically investigate the challenges posed by contemporary knowledge production and appropriation, through the exam of relationships between the production of knowledge in different settings (academic or not) and the transformations that have taken place in multiple historical, social and cultural contexts. We propose that the conceptual frameworks from different fields of study – such as Philosophy, Sociology, Linguistics, Psychology and the specific Didactic areas – be employed to investigate formal and non-formal educational processes, especially matters related to: a) knowledges produced in various formative contexts; b) teaching and research methods applicable to teaching and learning processes in multiple levels and settings; c) the constitution of scientific and mathematical knowledge; d) the specific and pedagogical knowledges necessary to the production of knowledge; e) how to incorporate scientific formation in K-12 syllabi; f) the production of textbooks and other learning resources; g) the mechanisms by which meaning is produced in a variety of languages (written, oral, imagetic, cartographic, hypermedia, scientific etc.); h) teacher formation and continuing professional development aiming at the integration of media to the social practices that comprise the educational ethos; i) digital inclusion actions and/or programs that work towards social inclusion; j) teacher formation and continuing professional development geared towards conceptual teaching and learning; k) the constitutive elements of pedagogical activity in general and teaching and learning processes in particular.
Advisors
Claudia Lemos Vóvio
Emerson Izidoro dos Santos
Érica Aparecida Garrutti
Jerusa Vilhena de Moraes
Lucila Maria Pesce de Oliveira
Sandro Luis da Silva
Vanessa Dias Moretti