Conflict as foundation of social practices: an analysis of senses of teachers, student education and citizenship

Abstract

This work consists of a semantic-enunciative analysis in the light of the Semantics of the Event regarding the relationships of meaning between teacher and citizenship. Based on the premise of a thematic path (Guilhaumou; Maldidier; Robin, 1994 apud Zoppi-Fontana, 2018); we used legal texts, marketing texts and texts from the journalistic media about educational public policies and in contact with these readings we considered analyzing which relationships of meaning orbit between teacher and citizenship, since these words are present in the observed texts. In this way, we dedicate ourselves to answering the following question: Through the analysis of the enunciative relationships in such texts, which meanings can be observed between teacher and citizenship in the corpus investigated, which meanings are constituted? Through our questioning, we raised the hypothesis that citizenship is a central issue and constitutes meanings of teachers and students' education. To undertake the analysis of the meanings of teacher and citizenship in the selected corpus, we resorted to the theoretical and methodological assumptions of the Semantics of the Event (Guimarães, 2002b, 2018), a semantic-enunciative theory that takes the enunciation as a language event that produces meaning from a subject's relationship with language, and this relationship is crossed by the political, as the conflict is established at the heart of saying. The meanings are neither fixed nor watertight, as they are constituted in the enunciation, that is, in each language event, and they are not transparent, as the subject does not control the meanings of what he says. To analyze our data, we made use of methodological procedures of the theory such as rewriting, articulation and the Semantic Domain of Determination (DSD), in addition, we relied on the paraphrase mechanism pointed out by Guimarães (2011) as an analysis mechanism for Semantics do Acontecimento and developed by Souza (2019) and Souza and Ventura (2022). The analyzes carried out corroborate our hypothesis and point to a conflict of meanings that divides and re-divides the space of enunciation in a relationship of inclusion and exclusion of citizenship in relation to the teacher and the students. Although the teaching profession is recognized as fundamental for citizenship education, the teacher is placed as the sole responsible for promoting it while senses of meritocracy are established with regard to student training and citizenship is given as a watertight category of the curriculum. Such meanings make professors and students responsible and erase the meaning of the role of policies for citizenship education and for valuing the teaching profession.