“Acabou que eu virei professora e sou apaixonada com a educação”: representações sociais de mulheres campesinas sobre educação

Abstract

This thesis aims to identify and interpret the Social Representations of peasant women on education. To achieve this objective, data collection was held over two stages: the application of surveys and by conducting narrative interviews. The survey included objective questions and a Free Word Association Test (FWAT). In the narrative interview, photography was used as a tool to access memories. Data analysis was carried out considering the Theory of Social Representations (TSR) using Content Analysis as the analysis method. By 2022, 205 (two hundred and five) women had graduated from LECampo UFMG, of which 66 (sixty-six) participated in the survey and 13 (thirteen) in the narrative interviews. When invited to reflect on education in theirs lives, the peasant women participating in this research revisited their stories, recalling significant experiences and memories. The analysis was based on the representational elements of knowledge, law, struggle, freedom and transformation. These elements appear anchored mainly in family relationships and the denial of rights historically constituted by the peasant population. By using photographs, participants brought subjectivities and ways of feeling to the surface and filled gaps that orality alone was not able to cover. The construction of consciousness based on knowledge, narrated from a dialectical perspective, makes women understand education as a right over time. This is experienced at the intersection of denial/access and through what they understand as struggle. Freedom lies in achieving and is in opposition to the symbolic shackles that the social structure imposes on these women, such as the ties linked to gender, class and peasant identity. As the story of gaining consciousness is told, the present feeling of freedom is destabilized and reconstitutes itself as an ideal to be achieved. The analyses demonstrate that education, when experienced as transformation by women, has the potential to destabilize or reorganize historically elaborated social representations, based on the new knowledge, experiences and relationships that they acquire. LECampo emerges as a space-time that brings another layer of knowledge into the lives of these women, allowing them to engage in social praxis by looking at structures, power relations and inequalities from a perspective of prominence and transformation. For now, this new layer of knowledge destabilizes other representations so that education as a right, struggle, freedom and transformation can emerge. They reinforce how much the profession has intentionality, involves responsibility, dedication, effort, mobilization and updating of knowledge. We identified that these reflections contain elements that align with an education and society project. As someone who looks to the past with the aim of transforming the future, they find in Rural Education the epistemological, political and pedagogical framework for their personal and professional praxis in the world. Finally, education is felt and experienced as a permanent experience that constitutes and signifies what it is to be in the world, a continuous process of (re)existence and transformation.