Educação do campo: discursos sobre currículo, identidades e culturas

Abstract

Education in rural areas must face contemporary society with its multiple realities and the varied interests and expectations of the students, parents and the rural communities involved. This study has the objective of analyzing the curriculum proposed for this type of education at a central school in the rural surroundings of the city of Campo Grande, State of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. The question is whether the proposed curriculum attends to the specific realities of rural life and takes into account the students’ social and cultural identities and characteristics. To answer this question we carried out a study to analyze discourses of persons involved related to aspects ranging from the historical context of rural education to proposals for adapting contents of curriculums. Based on the perspective of cultural studies, the option was to carry out an ethnographic study on education by adopting techniques of participating observation as a methodological procedure, with a daily log and semistructured interviews with two elementary school administrators and four teachers. The purpose was to analyze their discourses regarding proposed adaptation of the school’s curriculum to education in and for rural realities. A questionnaire was used to draw up profiles of the administrators and teachers. The results show that the proposed curriculum for education in rural areas does not differ from those followed in urban schools in terms of structure, content and curricular organization. The reason may be that rural schools, out of date with national policies and directives, have not fostered adaptation of curriculums to attend to the specific aspects of rural areas and the characteristics of their populations. The interviews indicate that the proposed curriculum merely describes identities and stresses differences, since the contents of urban culture are given priority in the curriculum, while the knowledge and realities of rural cultures have been silenced or ignored. We bring up the possibility of constructing a specific proposal for a curriculum that will take into account socio-cultural differences and establish intercultural dialogue between education in rural and in urban settings.