Cacimbas do sertão: um estudo do grupo de pesquisa Sertania e Educação (2003-2020)

Abstract

The object of this dissertation is the Sertania and Education Research Group. We aim to understand the paths taken and the marks that made up this research group, limiting the journey to the years 2003 to 2020. This starting question unfolded into others, such as: What is sertania? What were the places where sertania was sown and germinated? What marks (footprints) has the group's journey left over these seventeen years? Can Sertania be configured as a theoretical tool for research or researchers in education? To answer them, we assume Carlo Ginzburg's evidential paradigm, but treating it as a method. The sources that provided us with data and information were the Research and Extension Projects; Academic Productions, such as articles, books, monographs, dissertations, theses; the Study Groups linked to the Sertania Research Line and Youth and Adult Education that nurtured the Sertania and Education Research Group; the events held; teacher curricula; the Group's e-mails and photos found in the teachers' personal collection, in the researcher's collection and on the computer in room 19 of the Education Center, UFRN, in addition to making use of the free conversational interview with some participants of the Group. From a theoretical point of view, we work as a background a reflection on education, craftsmanship and the sertão, nourishing these reflections with the conceptions of Freire (1983), Mills (2009), Barbosa Junior (2017), Rosa (1959), Euclides (1902) and Ferreira (2018). With all the study movement, and from the traces found, we came to understand that the Sertania and Education Research Group started as a study movement in Caicó-RN; assumed the word sertania from Nivaldete's poem; there was never any intention to have a leader, but to bring together people who like to study and think; that the two professors from Caicó created the Sertania Research Line and Lifelong Youth and Adult Education at UFRN's central campus, to provide conversation circles, loving dialogues and listening as fundamental conditions for those who needed them; the Sertania and Education Research Group was institutionalized in 2010, thinking about Scientific Initiation and Postgraduate Research; that throughout these seventeen years the Group assumed peculiar characteristics, such as not looking for authors, but looking for what authors were looking for in an anthropophagic way; that the focus has always been the person who is in the group and not concepts or theories that precede their existence, and, finally, we realize that there is no concern in making the Sertania and Education Research Group a new scientific paradigm, but to provide studies that make their participants/researchers understand, in their academic productions, how the object is made in itself, affirming with this notion that the researcher and his research are unique and united in the vastness of each ser-tão.