Caminhos de liberdade no bairro São Benedito: um convite à releitura do pensamento de Morin

Abstract

Entitled “Paths of freedom in the São Benedito neighborhood: an invitation to reread Morin’s thoughts”, this doctoral manuscript was developed through the Postgraduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, in the major study area of Brazilian Education: Management and Pedagogical Practices; in the research line: Discourses, practices, ideas and subjectivities in educational processes, and its central discussion was the freedom of the teachers' being and knowledge. In search of a way of freedom of the teacher's being and knowledge, I produced an exercise of walking through the São Benedito neighborhood people memories in the city of Juiz de Fora/MG. The general objective was “to weave narratives of teachers’ freedom as announcements for languages that would enable other ways of inhabiting education”. I observed, throughout the research, that some of the São Benedito residents progressed in their schooling from early childhood education to high school, moving between the three public schools located in this neighborhood. On average, 30% of the teaching staff at these schools are residents of the neighborhood, who completed their studies at the school where they now teach. From this premise, I tried to answer the question: What can the power of freedom of the teachers' being and knowledge do? I was based on the theoretical framework of complex thinking (Morin, 2007a) and narrative investigation (Connelly; Clandinin, 2008) as a research methodology. The methodological paths were driven by what I called Mosaics of Conversations, where I narrated, through open rationality (Morin, 2020a), the memories that the research subjects had of the neighborhood and how these elements were interconnected with history and the broader geography of the Brazilian context, making us think about other modes of education, especially in its micro sense (Veiga-Neto, 2014). Memories and narratives from two groups of subjects were welcomed: Group 1, with the interest of thinking about the movement of freedom of being and knowledge constituted by a teacher and three teachers raised from the neighborhood who work as teachers at the school they studied; and Group 2, formed by five long-time residents of the neighborhood who witnessed the growth of this territory since the first homes, enabling me to understand the cultural system (Morin, 1977) of this place. The research was developed through the exercise of thinking philosophically about education in the light of complex thinking based on memories-rememberings (Bergson, 2006) of the two São Benedito Groups in relation to the told and/or veiled history of the city of Juiz de Fora/ MG, inviting us to get to know ourselves, the neighborhood, the city and to rethink the movements in Brazil's history, weaving relationships between the whole and the parts (Morin, 2003a). From the lifeshoulders and work of the thinker Edgar Morin, whose freedom is based on the relationship between autonomy and dependence (Morin, 1999), I contemplated that freedom requires multiple ways to manifest itself; and in walking with the complex thought and the people of São Benedito, I bring, in this thesis, a notion of freedom as an awareness that directs our narratives in and with the world