Valéria Moreira de Freitas Guimarães
Abstract:
Educational policies are a normative framework that underpins the entire institutionalized process of teaching and learning. As a result, knowledge about education policies and how they constitute and form the social subject tells about the model of society we are building. With this in mind, this work is linked to the Educational Policies, Management and Teacher Training research line of the Education Postgraduate Program of the Federal University of Goiás/Jataí Regional/GO and aims to research the educational policies. The investigative purpose arose because we understand that, for the participants of the school structure, knowledge about educational policies, the ways in which they are presented and instituted, tell about the form of education that is present in educational environments. We saw in the subject of the school principal the official representative in the attributions for the development of these norms. From this we ask: what constitutes educational policies, what is understood in the speech of the school principal? Thus, the main goal of the research was to understand what are the social representations of directors of basic education of public schools in Jataí/GO city on educational policies. The quantitative and qualitative research was guided by the Theory of Social Representations (TRS), our theoretical and methodological option. Along with the contributions of TRS, we contributed to Moscovici (1978), Jodelet (2001) and their collaborators; and the theoretical framework on educational policies was based mainly on theorists such as Arendt (2013), Martins (1994), among others. The research universe focused on 18 participants, who were interviewed from a semi-structured questionnaire. Data were collected, transcribed and processed using IRAMUTEQ software, which generated four classes of analysis: 1) School principal assignments (26.8%); 2) Believe and discredit policies and improvements (26.7%); 3) Values and practices (23.7%); 4) Difficulties in school routine (22.7%), which, in turn, were analyzed based on the theoretical framework based on the SRT, the norms for educational policies and the theory about educational policies. From the data, we conclude that the social representations of school principals on educational policies are based on their experiences in educational environments and understood as being especially linked to their duties as principal. And that these educational policies contribute little to the full development of their work, because they showed unbelieving and unmotivated due to some elements present in school daily life.
