Senha do mundo – narrativas de jovens em experiências de acesso à cultura

Abstract

The dissertation entitled ―Password to the World, youth narrative in their experience towards culture access‖ goes back in time in its relationship with action and reflection on the threshold between Education and Culture. This is a Master´s Degree Dissertation which conveys a contemporary view from the management of the Municipal Secretariat of Culture of Juiz de Fora, considering the possible effects of public policies which warrant the access to culture in its multiple dimensions. It is also a work which evokes deep past experiences, as well as their resulting narratives. The meaning-construction processes resulting from the experience of a group of youths is taken as the very basis of this work due to their relationship with culture, which allowed the students to realign their pathway towards both successful school and professional life, breaking away from the vicious circle of poverty and social exclusion which underpinned their lives. The key issue being investigated can be put as follows: how do the students experiencing a unique opportunity of cultural production within the school context perceive their right to culture and how does this reflect on their individual and group narratives? In order to answer these questions, conditions were offered so that these narratives were produced by seven youths taking part in an art and culture-based project in an urban municipal school of Juiz de Fora between 1995 and 2005. As for the methodology, devices were selected during research in order to evoke their memories. These mnemonic devices also brought back my memories and reinterpretations of those experiences, focusing on the mobilization of different languages resulting from different cultural frameworks, consistent with what featured the experience of a school which effectively communicated across multiple cultural dimensions. Letters and a video clip with 135 photos of the group´s trajectory apart from a focus group worked as triggers and were capable of mixing the individual´s memory layers. In order to interpret the narratives, Ecléa Bosi´s concepts on the memory of working class citizens were used, as well as Marilena Chauí´s studies on the right to culture, Michel Conelly´s and Jean Clandinin´s ideas on narratives and Michel de Certeau´s structured thinking on the concept of culture in the plural. Working as a binding element between the experienced past and the living present as a moment of reinterpretation and resignificance, the poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade was chosen as a metanarrative which framed time, interpreting experience and producing meaningful messages to the reader. This choice can be explained by the group´s history and its relationship with the words which were so beautifully used by the poet and interacted so closely with our narratives.