A negação da diferença: um estudo sobre as interações de alunos com deficiência visual na escola pública

Abstract

This study searches to understand how the interactions of students with visual handicaps take place at school. It is an empiricist inquiry which describes and analyses these students's experience of schooling at a public school in Salvador, Bahia. Considering that the current pedagogic discourse in Brazil appeals to a perspective of housing the differences, this research analyses how this inclusivistic guiding is being conducted in everyday life at schools. The main theoretical source of this study is the Critical Theory of Society, favouring the studies of Theodor Adorno about the rise and the analysis of prejudices as one of the elements that supports the social denial of the defficiency. This study aims to understand how the unfamiliar that causes the difference manifests itself, in this case, the visual handicap, trying to explain its reinforcement through the school education. Thus, we follow the discussion and the debate about the differences in the present day society aiming to strenghten the inclusivistic proposition and the meaning of the defficiency as a peculiar individual quality that becomes an unacceptable difference in the scope of the social relations. As the difference is not a natural and static condition, its perception is subjected to the values the society attributes to it in order to make it understandable. The analysis of the data, acquired through interviews, personal observations and documents from the school, has shown that the interactions of students with visual handicap are conditioned to measures that materialize these relatioships. Considering that the meaning of the defficiency is the result of the history of the individual combined with the social environment,the rejection to the defficiency at school is the result of the discarding of the individual's own meaning in his apprehension of reality, through contacts, rules,and contrapositions that emerge from his experiences