Estudo da proposta curricular para o ensino médio noturno da Secretaria Estadual de Educação do Rio Grande do Norte: foco na formação do trabalhador estudante

Abstract

This work is an analysis of the School Curriculum Proposal for the Night-time Secondary Education (EMN) which has been developed in eleven schools belonging to the public school network of the State of Rio Grande do Norte. This proposal arises out of an attempt to finding alternative solutions for bringing down the high rates of school drop-outs, absentees and repetition of the school year by student workers, a recurrent problem which has enormous negative impact on this type of education. With a view to changing this picture, the research has to be based on the premise that the EMN should not be seen as a continuation of the day-time education, having in mind that the night-time students present specific characteristics which have a bearing on the time allocated to classes, school curriculum organization, teaching methodologies and evaluation system. This presupposes a diversified education structure (school curriculum, contents, goals, inter alia), reflecting the interests of those involved and which should not merely entail a school education culture. To confer a diversified identity to EMN implies its insertion into the real-life context, a task which may require fundamental changes in the political, pedagogical, and ideological systems which sustain it. The embracement of the Proposal by the education professionals involved led them to change their own pedagogical practices in the school space to better improve their own learning and that of their students. The resulting experience is a pertinent one and emerges as a state policy in expansion since 2007. The theoretical foundation to back the research relies on the ideas of Gramsci Unitary School (1987, 1991, 2006); the critical school curriculum of Sacristán (2000, 2002, 2006, 2008), Apple (2001, 2002) and Bourdieu (2003, 2006, 2008); and the ideas of Teachers Training and Professionalization articulated by Ramalho, Núñez e Gauthier (2004), amongst others. The data analysis takes into account the School Curricula Orientations for the Night-time Secondary Education of the State of Rio Grande do Norte, questionnaires applied to teachers and to student workers and reports of the schools involved in the project, following the perspective of the Content Analysis of Bardin (2010) and the software Modalisa 6.0 developed by Paris 8 University.