To reproduce or to transform? Analysis of the teacher’s role in maintaining/ deconstructing of stigma at school

Abstract

This work was carried out in a model school of the public high school in the outlying areas of Fortaleza (CE) and discusses how the existing social classes differences between teachers and students condition the teachers’ social representations about their pupil, contributing to make the school a space of dispute between reproduction and social mobility. In exploratory observations held at the Class Council at the end of the 2012 school year, the researchers noted the frequent issuance of disqualifying judgments by teachers in upholding the disapproval of unsuccessful students in relation to mastery of skills and/ or disciplinary requirements. In many of these statements, instead of pedagogical criteria, judgments based on social class markers predominated. Thus, in order to investigate the hypothesis that there is a stigmatizing view of teachers in relation to their students, as part of the social construction process of the school as a reproductive space of inequalities, six teachers were interviewed, and the researchers found the predominance of two styles of thought, typified as cordial and humanistic. The construction of stigmatizing representations is characteristic of the cordial type (in the Buarquian sense), unlike the humanistic type, which adopts positions that are more critical. In this way, the polarization between these perspectives indicates the role of the teacher in the school as an agent that can contribute to changing or maintaining order.