Representações sobre educação formal no discurso de professores indígenas: uma análise semiótica

Abstract

Taking the concept of representation as, in on hand, a signifying system that uses the language to materialize itself, and, on the other hand, as a means to construct identities, we seek, through this dissertation, to construct possible meanings for the indigenous teachers` representations regarding formal education, schools and languages. The corpus is composed by the statements of the teachers João Machado and Edna Souza, both collected by the researcher José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy, who published them in the book entitled Kaiowá`s Death Chant: oral life story. The interviews show, both, the internal and external relationships, established in the indigenous area of Dourados, as complex and conflicted, given the fact that by the time the narrators told their life stories the indigenous area was going through an extremely critical moment –the suicide –, a concrete fact which served as a conductor to the interviews. Nevertheless, as they narrate their life stories, the teachers display, as well, in their discourse/text other topics, such as the formal education. The research is supported by the French semiotic theory, as postulated by the language theorist Algirdas Julien Greimas and his followers. We believe it offers us the appropriated theoretical-methodological basis to the analysis proposed. Thus, we try to perceive, in and through the discourse, the images that are built about formal education.