Relational trust in the "local actors - government actors" relation: research on its influence in active participation processes

Abstract

This project aims to research the factors that affect the production of quality of public schools, seeking to understand the centrality of the category "relational trust" (Bryk et al., 2010) into policies that intend to be participative. We start from the relevance of this category in the school level, under the hypothesis that the weakening of relational trust between local actors and central decision-making actors that formulate the policy tends to destabilize the school and its work processes. The public school system of Campinas city emerges as focus of this research, given the experience of this system with the policy of "participative institutional assessment" that aims to encourage the active participation of local actors in the negotiation process about the educational quality. Given the current state of uncertainty and discontinuity of government support concerning this policy, added to the disappointment of the local actors, we propose to investigate how the relational trust between teachers and central actors, and between teachers and other school actors, affect their willingness to actively participate in the negotiation processes. The methodological choices include mapping the degrees of relational trust of 44 schools in the school system (through questionnaires); sistematic observation in the selected schools according to the different mapped degrees of relational trust; semi - structured interviews and "focus groups"; and definition of analysis categories in order to understand the link between relational trust and active participation. (AU)