Reflections on teachers’ discourse about indiscipline and poor school performance

Abstract

Discourse is neither neutral nor naive. It manages and articulates memories, ideologies and silences that constitute man and his history. From such assumptions, this study analyzes teachers’ discourse from the perspective of french discourse analysis, based on Orlandi (2003), Brandão (2004) and Maingueneau (2005). We examine the position of Portuguese Language Teachers of Junior High School on indiscipline and poor school performance. For that, six semi-structured interviews with teachers from the municipality of Barreira and seven interviews with teachers from the municipality of Redenção were conducted and recorded in audio files. Both cities are in the region of Maciço de Baturité, in the state of Ceará, situated in the Brazilian northeast. We problematize the discursive intersections present in teachers’ discourse and reflect upon the symbolic construction of reality from the perspective of these subjects, who are apparently neutral, but in fact loaded with ideologies. In our interviews, we noticed that teachers appropriated themselves of four socially instituted ideas: a) Classroom interaction is regulated by the teacher; b) Indiscipline is the result of student’s interaction with his / her family context; c) Respect is associated with the idea of fear; d) Affectivity is the main instrument of rapprochement with students. The results point to tensions between the discourse of the current pedagogy and the discourse of traditional pedagogy, often mixed in the collected corpus statements; to the action of memory and oblivion over the analyzed discourse constitution, in the sense of reformulating pre-constructed ideas and producing the novelty effect; to the presence of other discourses, such as the sexist, capitalist, juridical and religious, also evidenced in the analyzed texts.