Poder y educaciónla construcción de los universos sociopolíticos a través de los discursos y las prácticas curriculares mediadas por los libros de texto

Resumen

This research is based on the hypothesis that, despite the fact that the emergence of Democracy is considered the most important event of the twentieth century (Amartya Sen, Carole Pateman, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, etc.), the form in which it is represented (depicted) as a form of social and political organization in the network of curricular discourses, school practices and experiences has a restricted and one-dimensional nature. This research aims to unravel the strategies for the teaching and learning of democratic universes (knowledges, ideas, experiences and democratic practices) of compulsory secondary education students in the Province of A Coruña, Galicia. The corpus examined is composed of Citizenship Education, Classic Culture, Ethic-Civics Education, Geography, History, Language and Literature, Latin and Religion textbooks published by Anaya, Edebé, Rodeira, Santillana and SM for the four year levels of Obligatory Secondary Education (ESO). A qualitative data analysis methodology has been used, with a deductive-inductive analytical itinerary. The deductive categories have been constructed from a synthesis of the categories used in the international comparative study of the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), entitled International Report: Civic knowledge, attitudes, and engagement among lower-secondary school students in 38 countries (ICCS 2009). To these we have added categories developed by researchers in the field of democracy such as David Held, Pierre Rosanvallon and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Through semi-structured interviews and discussion groups of students and interviews with teachers, we have consulted with 11 Secondary Education Institutes (IES) to establish the model of democratic practices and experiences that are provided and promoted in the school life and from school institutions. The main results of this study include, in the first place, that the curricular discourse (texts and images) guides the idea of democracy towards an eminently electoral, representative and elitist design to the detriment of other democratic institutional designs such as participatory democracy and high intensity democracy. In general, there is a tendency to exclude or undermine those designs involving other vectors of sociopolitical expression different from the electoral ritual, which are linked to social actions and citizen political participation. In the second place, the interviews, discussion groups and observations show that the experiences and democratic practices in the classroom and school reinforce a procedural, electoral and elitist idea of democracy, at the same time that they do not favor or allow participatory learning of democracy.