Conceptions of a good student in the view of retired teachers from the Santa Catarina state teaching network

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the attributes conferred by retired teachers of Santa Catarina's state education network to good student, built in view of the following characteristics: primary attributes, as those that emerge under the auspices of family inheritance; secondary attributes, being those that consider the conduction of single students' practical reasons; tertiary attributes, which occur in the aspect of social space and quaternary attributes, that manifested themselves by the economic-psychic-symbolic aspect. All of them being strongly demarcated by economic and symbolic capital. Methodologically, the centrality of school merit guides the analysis, having has fundaments the studies of Dubet (2003; 2008) and the representations of teachers as references. 894 questionnaires were analyzed to draw the profile of this contingent of teachers, focusing on the following variables: professional career, gender, condition of retirees, place of origin and place of training. As a visual resource, we resort to the elaboration of a word cloud, proposed by Mcnaught (2010). The collecting of words occurred based on the category “level of education” as main filter, and the analyzes were mainly based on categories elaborated by Bourdieu in his theoretical production, such as family inheritance, theory of the action, social space and symbolic power. We consider that the attribute of good student in this specific case, is the outcome of “negotiation” between school and family and results from the representations that each of these institutions builds on the other. These representations vary according to social categories and “pedagogical contracts” that are nuanced by the degree of mutual trust and clarity of the visible, explicit demands, but also and essentially by the veiled ones.