Researchers, teachers and students develop projects and suggest solutions for a better school
Brazil is one of the countries that invests the least resources in basic education, according to the study A Look at Education, published in September last year by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The organization analyzes the educational systems of its 35 member countries, most of which are developed, and ten others in development, including Brazil, Argentina, China and South Africa. According to the study, Brazil spends 3,8 dollars annually per student in basic education (elementary I and II and secondary education), almost a third of the average for OECD countries (10,5 thousand dollars per student).
In higher education, the amount rises to almost 11,7 thousand dollars, which is close to the amount spent by Portugal and Spain, and the average of 16,1 thousand dollars in the countries analyzed. In the evaluation of the International Student Assessment Program (PISA), also from the OECD, Brazil is among the last placed. The test measures the knowledge of students aged 15 in the areas of science, mathematics and text comprehension. According to the report published by the organization, the amount of investment is not as decisive as the adequate allocation of resources to guarantee quality and equity in access to education.
For the director of the Faculty of Education (FE) at Unicamp, Dirce Djanira Pacheco e Zan, the lack of investment in the structural issue of schools is symptomatic. The teacher studies high school institutions in the Campinas region based on everyday school life, raising questions about the meanings that school takes on for young students at public institutions. Dirce Zan highlights the context of dismantling of public schools in the State of São Paulo, starting with the poor conditions of the facilities, which sometimes lack basic maintenance and building preservation actions. Furthermore, many of them are surrounded by fences, and do not have alternative educational spaces to classrooms, making diverse teaching-learning dynamics impossible.
“Apart from this, we experience a daily absence of teachers due to the conditions offered, which are discouraging. At the same time, we see that students like going to school”, says the researcher. She recalls the movement of occupations of public schools in the country in 2016, led by the students themselves who demanded quality education and took ownership of the school space and decision-making about this space. “It was very interesting to see that students want to stay at school.” And why do they want it? The professor highlights some hypotheses based on what she has found in her research. “This is largely due to what remains good at the school. Young people, in their interviews, highlight the work of teachers who remain dedicated to their work, despite so many adversities. These teachers continue to believe in their students, believe in a project, and thus create different experiences,” she highlights. For her, these experiences are encouraging, and demonstrate that school is still a promising space in terms of training and possibilities, even though it is so poorly looked after by public authorities in general.
Occupations
Called “Secondary Spring”, the public school occupations in 2016 took a strong stance against Constitutional Amendment Proposal number 241 (PEC 241, which froze Federal Government expenses in several areas, including education, for 20 years) and the Secondary Education Reform, which were being voted on at that time. Both proposals were approved, which represented a defeat for the movement, but the mobilization left its mark in schools and in the debate about public education in Brazil. In the view of the FE director, the movement is surprising for the strength it demonstrates in reaching the entire country (in total, it is estimated that more than a thousand schools are occupied), and for going against the widely propagated thesis of youth's lack of interest in education.
For the teacher, the movement could easily be accused of wanting to occupy schools for fraternization, so that young people could live freer experiences of collective coexistence, but, contrary to that, the students created productive models of organization. In this way, the occupations showed how students created class routines, with invitations to researchers from different areas, with the demand to explore different subjects and artistic activities. “They cry out for the need for knowledge within the school as well, a view that this school is also impoverished in terms of what it offers in terms of learning and learning experience. And this is linked not only to the deepening of knowledge, science, but to other methodological ways of working with students”, explains Zan.
Asymmetries
The disparity between the quality of public basic education and higher education in Brazil is clear, and is also expressed in the difference in investments. On average, practically three times as much is invested per student in higher education as in basic education, according to the most recent OECD figures.
Published in January 2018, the report Research in Brazil, produced by Clarivate Analytics and disseminated by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), it succinctly analyzes the performance of Brazilian research, describing recent trends and identifying highlights of knowledge production in the country. It is no surprise that the document points to public universities as the main knowledge-producing institutions. In the list of the 20 institutions that produce the most scientific publications (and are responsible for more than 90% of publications in the main journals) there is no private education institution.
Dirce Zan points to the historical process of dismantling public basic education in the country from the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s, with the military government. The scrapping of public schools purposefully coincides with the arrival of private schools as an alternative. She explains that the ideological discourse about the inefficiency of public services, and the excellence of private services as an alternative, gained strength in the 1990s. “At this moment, we began to see families migrating to private schools in search of the best education for their children. And it is clear that this movement takes place in an unequal and elitist way, because this implies transit based on purchasing power”, she points out. In this way, the devaluation of public schools is accompanied by the devaluation of professionals, based on the flattening of teachers' salaries in the public system and their migration to the private system.
“In the case of public universities, this process may be ongoing, I am afraid that this is what is emerging. And this puts the university at risk, because, in this model that we understand, that is, the institution guided by the inseparability of teaching, research and extension, responsible for producing science, is an expensive institution, it is not possible to pay for it with monthly fees. of students”, warns the researcher. In her view, the strengthening of discourses about the lack of resources to invest in education, and the charging of monthly fees in public institutions emerging as an alternative, are signs of an attempt to dismantle it, putting the university project at risk.
Alternatives
If the objective is for young people to complete high school satisfactorily, blaming public education for students' poor performance in the PISA assessment is not enough. A most recent evaluation, carried out in 2015, places Brazil's performance below the OECD average in both public and private education. For Dirce Zan, this result reinforces the argument that privatization is not a guarantee of improvement. As an example, starting from performance in large-scale exams, she cites the Federal Institutes (IFs) and application schools, which stand out every year among the best placed in the National High School Exam (ENEM). In 2017, the Federal Government excluded the results of the IFs from the official publication of the exam, and recanted after protests. In the survey carried out by the newspaper Folha de S. Paul, 22% of the best placed institutions (the 10% with the highest score) in last year's ENEM are public.
“What we see in these successful examples are well-trained teachers, adequate working conditions and salaries consistent with the role they perform. These teachers are paid not only for hours in the classroom, but also for extra work, which will be reflected in the classroom. So, these are conditions that enable the teacher to dedicate himself to organizing his class and updating it”, explains the researcher. She also remembers that these schools carry out selection processes for the admission of students. Although she does not defend the form of access, Zan points out the motivation of the selected group as a factor to be considered. “The teacher must understand that he needs to carry out pedagogical work to mobilize students”, she adds.
In this sense, Unicamp's Faculty of Education operates on different fronts of teaching, research and extension in defense of quality, free and democratic public schools. Celebrating 45 years in 2017, FE is represented in the public network by the teachers it has been training, as well as participating in the debate on education in the country. “We have colleagues who participate in the formulation of public policy projects for education, who work on programs such as textbook evaluation, and in efforts to think about curricula for basic education, among other fronts. We are responsible for a rich production of knowledge about the reality of public schools from different perspectives, whether pedagogical, methodological, management and policy. In addition, there are extension courses that we offer, working towards the continued training of the network’s teachers”, concludes the director.
Cinema as a pedagogical tool
The Maria Pavanatti Favaro Municipal Elementary School (EMEF), located in the Jardim São Cristóvão neighborhood, in Campinas, holds weekly film club sessions with its sixth to ninth grade and Youth and Adult Education (EJA) students. The initiative is part of a project coordinated by professor Carlos Eduardo Albuquerque Miranda, from FE, which works as a partnership with the Campinas Department of Education, to implement the "Cinema & Education Program: the Cinema Experience in basic education". The program encourages discussions and audiovisual productions to promote the appreciation of the school and its students.
The teacher coordinates the Kino Cinema, Education and Audiovisual Network, which is positioned in relation to the regulation of Law 13.006, of 2014. The law adds a paragraph to the Guidelines and Bases of National Education, and determines that the exhibition of nationally produced films is complementary curricular component integrated into the school's pedagogical proposal. Based on this determination, a partnership was established between the city hall, Unicamp, and interested schools, which resulted in the extension project that takes film clubs to the city's public schools.
For the teacher, the project is based on an understanding of cinema beyond simply another form of cultural education. The main front of the project are training courses for basic education professionals to set up audiovisual production film clubs, according to the wishes and conditions of each institution. The work methodology, which involved horizontal teaching and learning processes, and people from different backgrounds, allowed the project coordination to know the peculiarities of each school, and for them to be respected. Among the results of the project, we highlight the nine schools that in 2017 included the teaching of audiovisual production in their political-pedagogical projects, and the Extension and Postgraduate courses within the theme, offered by Unicamp, with almost 100 people enrolled.
“We start from the idea that everyone can talk about cinema, both those who talk about the theory and also those who talk about whether they liked it or not, without placing one knowledge above the other. The objective is to bring a cultural asset to the entire population, which is audiovisual, and promote access to this cultural asset not only as a spectator, but also as a director”, explains Miranda.
The professor highlights the importance of blurring the line that separates spectators and filmmakers, supported by the ideas of French critic, essayist and filmmaker Alain Bergala. “From a theoretical point of view, we follow Bergala. He recommends that when you watch a film and say, 'I wouldn't do the shot that way, I would cut it here', you start to read the film as a creator. This is much more powerful than criticism based on what the film 'wants to say'. Being critical, from this perspective, means thinking about how it can be done”, he summarizes.
Education and cinema
For the teacher, the Faculty of Education's commitment to public schools must focus on the school's real problems. Therefore, the project seeks alternatives to the technical difficulties encountered along the way. The absence of a dark space to show films, for example, motivated research into cinema in bright places, and the same happened with noise, almost inherent to school environments. Understanding the challenges that school brings to cinema allows us to deviate from the idea of cinema disseminated by the large film industry, and to embrace other possibilities.
Thus, Miranda emphasizes that the valorization of public schools primarily involves guaranteeing rights such as freedom of expression, culture, the expression of local cultures, youth and children's cultures, and that they can be discussed. "A Public schools must be a cultural space, not just a space for the dissemination of scientific, philosophical, or artistic knowledge. It must be a space for creation, and that is what gives it strength: being able to create. To create identities through works, to create dissent. As a space for the repetition of knowledge, the school will always be a fragile place”, he concludes.
For young people in the sixth year who attend the EMEI Maria Pavanatti Favaro film club, the space is an opportunity to discover new films and express themselves through authorial productions. In conversation with six students, some shy and others more relaxed, willing to talk about their experiences with the film club, the young people's curiosity stood out. “It's cool that there are films that we didn't even know existed, and we discovered them now. Before, I thought there were only three Brazilian films. I was actually kind of impressed when I discovered that there were so many films, and that was the impetus for me to attend the film club every week”, says Samuel Santos.
For Stephany Martins, the most interesting thing is to comment on the film and share it with colleagues. “We write down the name of the film and pass it on to other people to watch, if we find it interesting. Some we don’t understand very well, then we can understand after watching it for the second time”, explains the student. When asked if it had ever happened that each of them understood the film in a different way, the six answered “yes” in unison, accompanied by laughter. "Often. When we leave, we always talk,” says Samuel.
Cíntia Birocchi, Arts teacher at EMEI, coordinates the film club at the school, after having undergone the training offered by the project. She says she was motivated by the aim of developing critical thinking in students, in addition to her personal taste for cinema. “I saw that they produced a lot of images not only for classes, but of themselves, of each other, taking photos of each other all the time. I thought: this is very strong for these boys, so we have to start looking at these images. The school has to think about this”, she reflects.
She also highlights the opportunity to watch little-known films, and platforms like Afroflix, which brings together productions with at least one technical or artistic area signed by a black person. Furthermore, it highlights the qualities of the school, its coordination and pedagogical team. The school carries out several initiatives to promote democracy in its spaces, such as, for example, monthly student assemblies. “What is learned in one project influences others, things get mixed up. They raised a problem at the assembly which was the lack of teachers, and as a solution they suggested a video report. Thinking about how this can be done is an interesting production exercise, which is directly related to what we work on at the film club. And everything is going positively, it is not a decadent thing, as public schools are generally portrayed”, adds the teacher.
