School, communication and survival

Abstract

The present project results from the preoccupation with the contemporary impasses embodied inside school, but which involve surviving the suffering constituted in living. Once inside school, such impasses seek there new forms of communication and elaboration, but also talk of the profound psychic suffering that is structured intrapsychically, though in dynamic interaction with the dimensions of shared experience, in other words, dynamics that are fundamentally interpsychic and therefore social. The modalities of surviving suffering are many, depending on its extension and duration: from that in which the catastrophic experience permits the development of psychic resources and the expansions of the possibilities of being, to that whose lethal aspect of catastrophe is installed internally as psychic lethality, able to immobilize the entire areas of the mind and provoke deadly effects both in the internal and external environments. The survivors identified in schools can be refugees, victims of social exclusion and institutional indifference, young people who experience such measures as deprivation of liberty, and victims of racism, prejudice regarding gender, class, religion, domestic and sexual violence, and nowadays, children and youngsters who have been deprived of school and conviviality, who have lost friends and family members or who have had their minimun conditions of material subsistence vanished due to Covid-19, among others. The educator and the institution have no way of escaping the reality that, in many cases, deals with limit events, brutal scenarios, close to those portrayed by theorists and artists in periods of war. The bold aspect of the present project is in proposing the investigation of survival in its most extreme states of lethality, its matrices, risks and the possibilities of intervention by educators. Making use of the repertoire from history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, sociology and the cinema, the project relies on conceptual and aesthetic elements to explore the grey areas of psychism and the institutions that configure the space where psychic manifestations occur. Concepts such as "catastrophic change" (BION, 1962) and "emotional turbulence" (BION, 1987), "deprivation and anti-social behaviour" (WINNICOTT, 2005), "communication difficulty" (WILLIAMS, 1976), "non-verbal communications" (BALINT, 1986) as well as aesthetic elements, such as the visualities proposed by some films, "relational systems" (SORLIN, 1977) and empirical material previously collected by researchers in schools will be the initial organizers of the investigation. Guided by such questions as: "How can we deepen the concept of survival taking into account different theoretical references, different modalities of survival, their configuration in different historical times and in different social and educational contexts?", "Does the concept of survival have an impact on what is considered a school's responsibility or a school's task today?", "Would the survival of the teacher in their relation and communication with the student permit the school to contribute to the overcoming of lethal aspects associated to survival?", "What is the limit and reach of this form of teacher action?", the investigation aims, in the next 24 months of project development, systematize some elements to, in the future, dare to respond to the question: Is it possible to produce a pedagogical theory guided by the concept of survival and by the need to overcome it, in such a way as to create spaces of learning that result from significant communication, the elaboration of suffering, the re-appropriation of the art of narrating, of living, of becoming? (AU)