Discursive analysis about the (de)construction of the concept of democracy: wordings and doings within schools

Even though there seems to be consensus that the role of schools is to perform meaningful educational deeds, aimed at fostering democratic practices, schools appear in the news nowadays mostly due to acts of violence. This study, sponsored by FAPESP, investigates the relationship between teachers wordings and their doings related to the construction of democratic practices within the school environment, by means of semi-structured interviews with teachers, managers and other staff, as well as observations in three city public lower-secondary schools in the city of Ribeirão Preto, state of São Paulo. We adopted the theory and methodology of French Discourse Analysis to analyze the interdiscourse about the ideal of a democratic school, common within the school environment. This ideal can be interpreted from laws and official documents, such as the National Curricular Guidelines and the Brazilian Education Law (Lei das Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional - LDB), as well as the Federal Constitution, among others. Those documents will be analised facing the discourse produced by school staff in order to understand how close the wordings to the construction of democratic practices are. This study aims at pointing convergences and divergences inherent to the studied contexts. It is supported by the works of Foucault, Pêcheux, Gregolin, Orlandi, Assolini, Tfouni, Apple, Lima, Libâneo, Gadotti among others, to produce an analysis on the possibility for the school to create opportunities for students to become critical subjects of their own wordings and doings. The analysis shows that even though the school is still a disciplinary setting, aimed at form(at)ing subject-students and ideology legitimacy, it can still be a space for problematization of power relationships and education for critical subjects. (AU)