“How to show human and humanizing practices in such adverse and xenophobic contexts?” is the question posed by the Study and Research Group on Continuing Education (Gepec) at the 9th Fala Outra Escola seminar, held between the 10th and 12th of July at the Convention Center . Under the theme “Collecting: humanization practices with and for freedom”, experiences are being presented that teachers and professionals from schools and educational systems insist on collecting, even in adverse and unusual contexts. The program features conversation circles, dialogue sessions and displays of pedagogical work, as well as cultural events.
Inês Ferreira de Souza Bragança, professor at the Faculty of Education (FE) at Unicamp and member of the scientific committee for the event, explains that it is a meeting between university and school for dialogue and sharing of common knowledge. “Fala is a very special moment for teachers, undergraduate and postgraduate students and researchers from Gepec and different regions of Brazil. It has always been the reaffirmation of our fight for a quality, humanizing, liberating and critical public school.”
The current political context gives the event even greater relevance, reflected in the presence of more than 300 teachers from the basic network, in the opinion of the FE teacher. “We thought we would have a smaller number of participants because the context we were experiencing in 2018 was one of hopelessness and instability (which persists). But we see the opposite. This is because we at public universities and public schools understand that we need to be together to resist. And our way of resisting is to talk about these everyday practices and institute them.”
Inês Bragança sees attacks against teachers' work in the sense of precariousness, intensification and control; funding cuts; the non-prioritization of education and culture; the lack of an education project. “A meeting like this allows us to see what public schools do with great quality. What reaches us through the mainstream media is the failure of public schools. But, when we are at the school, what we see are engaged and committed teachers, despite the lack of public policies that actually guarantee the quality of teaching, careers, salaries and working conditions.”
The Unicamp professor mediated a conversation around “Teacher training and professional knowledge”, on “(Auto)biographical narrative research and its echoes in training experiences”, with the participation of professors Eda Maria de Oliveira Henriques, Andreia Diniz and Roberta Jardim Coube. “It is a research perspective that is committed to listening to what teachers, children, young people and adults produce together at school: knowledge, memory and history, knowledge needs to circulate. There is an epistemological and also political commitment, since these voices are generally silenced.”
Two other rounds of conversation took place on Thursday afternoon during Fala Outra Escola: on the axis “Subjectivities, memory and education of sensibilities”, the theme “Dance, digital technologies and cinema at school: construction of sensitive knowledge and children’s authorship” , with teachers Adriana Carvalho Koyama, Ana Carolina de Araújo, Karla Lopes Beck; and in the “Everyday Life and Educational Practices” axis, the theme “Collecting Languages: Art teaching and the construction of the collective in integrated technical education”, with Maria José Oliveira Nascimento, Rubia Cruz, Daniel Sávio Pereira da Silva.
In dialogue sessions, teachers and professionals from schools and universities express their experiences and reflections, indicating the plurality of their knowledge and knowledge and their pedagogical and educational practices that humanize and constitute spaces of freedom in the quest to produce “another school ”. The exhibition of pedagogical works “Co-Teaching” brings productions developed with children, young people and adults in basic education (infant, elementary, secondary, youth and adult education).
