Criar caminhos e construir qualidade social: trabalho pedagógico na EMEF do Campo Professor Hermínio Pagotto

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the educational project of EMEF do Campo Professor Hermínio Pagotto, a rural public school, in order to identify and understand the markers of social quality produced by its subjects (FAPESP proc.23/03785-0). In a scenario in which educational quality has been captured by managerial logic, the study asks how a school committed to the struggle for emancipatory education produces and prioritizes a quality of a different nature, one that is socially referenced. The research is grounded in the perspective of praxis and engages with investigative experiences built in partnership with schools committed to this understanding of quality. The discussion of emancipatory education draws on three references, the socialist pedagogy of the school-commune, Educação do Campo (Rural Education), and the schools of the Landless Rural Workers' Movement (MST), in dialogue with Paulo Freire and Antonio Gramsci. Methodologically, the study combines documentary, bibliographic, and empirical analysis, with interviews with education professionals, families, children, young people, and community leaders, along with collective work workshops as spaces for shared reflection. The initial organization of the corpus draws on content analysis, expanded by an enunciative perspective attentive to the context in which utterances are produced, to the materiality of texts, and to the historical, social, and institutional relations that shape the words of the participants. From these constructions of the word, the school is historicized through the threads of memory and of the lived experience of those who took part in its processes of pedagogical reformulation. This makes it possible to identify some features of its school form and the markers and conditions of quality formulated by students, families, and educators. The findings show that quality becomes intelligible in the encounter between the school's historicity and its school form, mediations that give shape to the markers and conditions of social quality. The markers comprise welcoming, work as an educational principle, an organic relationship with life, collective identity, collectivity, and human formation. They take shape in specific pedagogical practices, such as visits to the settlement plots, welcoming gatherings, collective decision-making times, and the presence of the settlement's memory in different formative moments, all organized by the school collective in ongoing dialogue with the territory. Everyday praxis, social struggle, memory, and public policies act as conditions that support the production and prioritization of these markers, which in turn guide actions capable of strengthening or reorganizing those same conditions. This relationship allows for a rethinking of the autonomy of school collectives in the construction of social quality. The study concludes that, in this school, social quality is built through reflective processes, through dialogue, and through work with the local community, in negotiation with central policies, depending on the community's own creative force more than on the definition of an ideal school model.