Participação da família na escola: como os protagonistas a compreendem

Abstract

This study aims at verifying how the phenomenon of participation is understood, in the school context, by a low income family and educators of a public school in São Paulo, in which an educational project was developed according to a dialogical perspective called Participation and Dialogue . This work had the thought of Paulo Freire as its main reference for the phenomenon of participation. The family was understood as a historical and situated phenomenon according to the conceptions of Philippe Ariès. This is a qualitative research that has as participants a family (father and mother) of a student enrolled in Year Four, a teacher who was teaching Year Three and a Pedagogical Coordinator, both involved in the project. In order to collect data for the research six reflective interviews were made: four of them, in different moments, with the Pedagogical Coordinator and the teacher, and the other two with the family (father and mother). The analysis of the reflective interviews followed the moulds proposed by Szymanski. The outcomes show that the researched family understands participation in the school life as something that is not very simple or common. It is seen as a walk to be done with the school, in its daily routine and the events it promotes, by providing activities that would be of the interest of the families and that would focus on learning improvement, both to the families and the students. The Coordinator recognizes the school difficulty to open itself to the families but sees the family participation in the school as a strengthening bond between the two institutions that guarantees safety to the students, helping them to achieve success in their school life. The teacher shares the myth of lack of interest and omission of parents of lower social classes in relation to their children s school life. She sees the family participation in the school as something positive if it offers differentiated activities in days and times that would be adequate to the families availability. This research showed that the family participation in the school life is a phenomenon that is still far from being part of the school routine and the difficulty is to overcome these myths, prejudices and resistances in the school. There is, however, a movement for the understanding of the importance of this partnership, a willingness that can be noticed in the speech of the pedagogical coordinator