Letramento político no legislativo: a experiência do programa Estágio-Visita

Abstract

This is an analytical study of the program of education for democracy Visit Internship, which is organized by the Center for Qualification, Training and Improvement of the Chamber of Deputies, a school that is part of the legislative education system in Brazil. The program is offered every month, on an annual basis, to fifty college students from several Brazilian states who visit the facilities of the National Congress, watch legislative sessions and participate in various activities such as lectures and simulation concerning the structure and the functioning of the parliament for a week. The purpose of the analysis was to assess how the political literacy formally works in a specific educational activity of a legislative school, since it is considered that this type of activity answer the institutional role of parliament to promote and strengthen democracy in the country. Specifically, from the redrafting of the concept of political literacy and of the characteristics of the education for democracy provided by the literature of the field, we sought to analyze what conception of formation of the democratic citizen and what content and what methodological strategies are present in the Visit Internship program. The selection of this program for analysis was due his characteristics of duration, audience and diversity of the activities that allow it to be read as a significant example of an actual experiment of political literacy held within the Legislative power. The research, which adopted a naturalistic perspective, was guided by the research strategy of illuminative evaluation and by the techniques of interviews with organizers and participants, questionnaire and observation of the August issue 2011 of the program. Although the results cannot be generalized but treated as subsidies to strengthen and improve, if necessary, similar actions, they show that the program comes in a limited horizon of political literacy and focuses on a formal vision of democracy and emphasizes the traditional knowledge of the Legislative power and adopts a teaching transmission perspective, among other features. These features makes the Visit Internship an essentially school program.