O rompimento da barragem de Fundão: repercussões nos saberes e práticas dos professores da escola de Bento Rodrigues

Abstract

On November 5, 2015, the Fundão tailings dam collapsed. It was operated by Samarco mining company and contained 55 million cubic meters of iron ore tailings. Bento Rodrigues district and its school, located in Mariana surroundings, in Minas Gerais, were both devastated by this collapse. Given this situation, this research seeks to understand how teachers of the early and final years of the basic education at Bento Rodrigues School are reconstructing their ways of thinking, feeling and acting about the school. The research methodology was divided in two stages: 1) bibliographic search about the Theory of Social Representations (TSR), Social Representations in Movement (SRM), Countryside Education and the Socio-territorial Approach from the perspective of triad Territorialization/Desterritorialization/Reterritorialization (TDR); analysis of official documents and reports produced about the collapse; data collection from the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (INEP) and also data collection on the research locus, at the school, and from public agencies in Mariana; 2) narrative interviews with six teachers of Bento Rodrigues Municipal School, to proceed with the data analysis in order to understand the SRM. The hypothesis of this research is the following: the successive changes of the school location, the emotional shock experienced by the teachers, who evacuated the school upon the arrival of the mud, the demands from public agencies, non-governmental organizations and society as a whole to carry out activities at school led the investigated participants to change their social representations. Most of the participants’ positioning oscillated in two movements: permanence and change of social representations. The data from the narrative interviews show that the dam collapse reflected on teachers’ knowledge and practice, changing several social representations already consolidated, such as their representations about themselves, about the school and about mining. The results also show that the collapse was devastating for teachers' personal and professional lives, affecting cognitive, sentimental and attitudinal aspects. In this context of abrupt changes, narrative interviews show cases of psychological illnesses among students and teachers. Because it is a changing context, the effects are still ongoing and even four years after the catastrophe, the school has not been rebuilt; the families were not resettled. There are also reports that the affected people were discriminated in the new social and school space.