Television and teachers: report on practices in classes of children aged 7 to 11

Abstract

In this summary we present the reports and reflections of teachers who participate in an on-going research project named Mapping the effects of media images on the imaginary of working teachers: treading the personal knowledge of a Symbolic Pedagogy. The teachers, who work with children aged between 7 and 11 years, in Brazilian state schools, have reflected upon the influences of television shows as potential sources of diverse readings. In class, they have carried out distinct interventions and have played the role of human media (Penteado, 2002, and Porto, 2005), meaning that these teachers have acted as bridges, screens or mirrors for communications in which individual and cultural contents of a certain culture are exchanged. According to Michel Maffesoli (2001:9), there is a quotidian sociology whose main particularity is to offer a reading of the social life considering the sphere of the quotidian as a place that, in its banality and receptivity, and accompanied by the corresponding imaginary, allows investigators and other social observers to find important elements for the understanding of a social weave and its complexity. Therefore, what we have intended was related to television as a possible source of teaching: by signifying and re-signifying contents and, above all, through the intervention of teachers, by enabling different dynamics and organizations of collective actions in a school environment. In such a manner, televised communication becomes a space for socialization and apprehension of other contents. It can be the means to organize, unite, and conquer spaces and desires of a determined group or community. We are, of course, entering a domain that will be the place of the universal human collective tendencies, that are transported or mediumizated by the media, through the identification with a character of and image..