Circulação do livro didático - entre práticas e prescrições: políticas públicas, editoras, escolas e o professor na seleção do livro escolar

Abstract

The object of this dissertation is the circulation of textbooks, focusing on their selection in public schools of São Paulo in the beginning of the 21st century. It started from the principle that the professional editors and public policies consider in this process market determinations, anticipating the selection by the teacher and deeply influencing the curriculum. Three fundamental instances are considering in the process: Editors, government and public policies for the textbook, represented by the National Textbook Program and the public school. As research procedures we used the book lists, from the 5th to 8th grades, received by public schools in São Paulo, in 2002, as well as interviews with teachers. The study of the textbook circulation gave us elements to establish relations between the actual curriculum and global procedures that bypass the school gates. This process gave us the opportunity to bring out the conflicts imposed on the teachers, who tend to administrate the tensions derived from the negotiations for the entrance of the textbook in the school, which sometimes are not directly connected with the educational proposals but with the market view. These conflicts have a bad influence in the public schools curriculum and appear in the official discourse as an example of the disqualification of the teacher. This study gave us elements to partially refute this kind of discourse, reviewing the teachers position towards the textbook. Authors like Michael Apple and Gimeno Sacristão,who wrote critical theories about curriculum, helped us situate the investigation object, in other words, the textbook circulation in the curriculum dynamics process