POLÍTICAS DE EDUCAÇÃO ESPECIAL NO ESTADO DE ALAGOAS

Abstract

This research aims to unveil the Special Education policies produced and enacted in the State of Alagoas, Brazil, with emphasis on the period after the 1990s, and also to analyze to what extent the enactment of these policies have guaranteed the right to education for the subjects of the Target-Population of Special Education (TPSE). The theoretical framework adopts a pluralistic epistemological perspective based on the approximations and complementarities of the policy cycle approach (BOWE; BALL; GOLD, 1992; BALL, 1994), of the enactment theory (BALL; MAGUIRE; BRAUN, 2016) and the concepts of Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory with emphasis on the concepts of field, habitus and symbolic power. The thesis formulated is as follows: the Special Education policies of the State of Alagoas tend to reproduce national policies, resulting in policies with a low capacity for articulation within the reality of the State, and for the needs of the subjects involved. As a result of this and a set of other contextual dimensions, the education offered to the students of the TPSE, in the schools of the public networks of Alagoas, configures itself as a limited service (with respect to access, quality and opportunities of development). In this sense, it is an educational offer that has not guaranteed the right to education for all subjects, making its maximum possible development difficult. The data collected were submitted to the relational analysis proposed by Bourdieu, through the application of selected techniques, namely: documentary analysis; semistructured interviews and classroom observations. The research, in the context of the practice, was carried out in two public schools located in the municipality of Delmiro Gouveia. Conclusions and approximations are presented from the categorization of the contexts of the policy cycle approach (context of influence, context of text production and context of practice) and the contextual dimensions of the enactment theory permeated by the Bourdieusian theory. The main conclusions are: a) the autonomy in the production of legal texts that regulate Special Education in Brazil and in the State of Alagoas is limited by influences from the global field of Education Policies and the national private economic field; b) the insufficient presence of the State in guaranteeing the minimum conditions for the enactment of Special Education policies is reflected in the inadequate provision of education from the point of view of legislation, irregular from the point of view of the education of the agents and limited from the point of view of the guarantee of the TPSE students’ access to common education and to the Specialized Educational Services; c) unaccountability of the school agents through outsourcing the teaching work; d) double process of exclusion of TPSE students in the context researched through self-elimination and marginalization from within; e) difficulty in transforming the education system into an inclusive space, due to the strong influence of the paradigms of normalization and integration. It is argued in favor of the possibility of overcoming the observed condition through the dissemination of knowledge as a triggering factor of the crisis necessary for the successful symbolic revolution (BOURDIEU, 2014).