GEOGRAFIA NA ESCOLA: UM CONHECIMENTO ALINHADO À CIDADANIA?

Abstract

The discourse about citizenship and the struggle for its conquest and establishment build the current Brazilian society. The State, through legal proposals to its educational system Law of National Educational Guidelines and Bases (9.394/96) -, establishes norms to the citizen formation as one of the aims of this system. The school has to align itself to this objective through its curriculum dynamics, in which there is place to Geography and other components of curriculum, and its teachers and technician staff from school. In this context, the objective of this research was to analyze the contribution of Geography to the citizen formation, to understand the activities in classroom as well as the teacher s discourse signs of this formation. The identification of the theoretical-methodological approach of the Traditional Geography and Critical Geography was also taken as an objective to be observed in the teacher s discursive references. This is a case study research with 5th and 6th grade groups from elementary school in Campina Grande, PB. Observation and interview were used to data collecting, what happened in December 2006 and February/April 2007 when six teachers were interviewed, and four of them had 56 classes observed. This research made possible to identify, in the pedagogical practice of Geography teaching, elements that promote or unleash the citizenship formation, through routine that observe the students duties accomplishment; the activities that develop geography syllabus; methodology that promote the participation and the regard attitude formation; the reception of student small critics. It was also perceived that the concept of the researchers about the concept of citizenship is centered mainly in the relation between rights and duties; critics to the citizenship not accomplished in the Brazilian society; the teacher s role in the citizen s formation. Although it was not possible to know how far the teacher s awareness about the specificity of situations in which his/her pedagogical action was also a citizenship forming. In our point of view, teaching to citizenship means, among other meanings, spread universal values from each culture values.