"Acende uma lanterninha e vai”: o discurso do sujeito-professor de línguas sobre os itinerários formativos

Abstract

According According to the Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC), the year 2017 was marked by significant changes in the educational landscape, directly impacting upper second- ary education. Law No. 13,415/2017, which amended the then-current Law of Guidelines and Bases of Education (LDB), introduced a structural reform of this educational stage. In 2022, the year in which the law was implemented in schools across different Brazilian states, teach- er-subjects were confronted with curricular changes, including a reduction in the workload of traditional curricular components and the introduction of optional components known as itin- erários formativos (formative itineraries). In this context, many teachers began teaching con- tent outside the scope of their initial academic training. This study aims to analyze the dis- course of language teacher-subjects regarding the formative itineraries of the New Secondary Education (Novo Ensino Médio). We are grounded in the theoretical and analytical framework of French Discourse Analysis, as developed by Pêcheux ([1988] 2014) and Orlandi (2020a), mobilizing core concepts such as discourse, subject-position, discursive memory, imaginary formation, and interdiscourse. Methodologically, the research archive was constructed from semi-structured interviews conducted between the first and second semesters of 2022, in pub- lic high schools located in the municipality of Chapecó, state of Santa Catarina (SC). These interviews were directed at language teachers who had taken on the responsibility of teaching curricular components within the flexible portion of the New Secondary Education curriculum. From this archive, we extracted a corpus composed of discursive sequences that reveal both contradictions and regularities in the ways of signifying a teaching practice in displacement. We begin with the hypothesis that, within the neoliberal framework that underpins the re- forms of the New Secondary Education, the being-being-a-language-teacher is (re)signified: the being—anchored in a discursive memory that produces effects of continuity through iden- tification with disciplinary teaching—is displaced by a being that is temporary, required by the formative itineraries, which demand flexibility, polyvalence, and efficiency. In this inter- pellative gesture, the teacher-subject is called upon to inhabit other positions, distant from the knowledge that constitutes their teaching practice, producing effects of meaning such as lack, disorientation, and (re)invention. We thus ask: what discourses sustain the narratives of in- service language teacher-subjects in the public school system of Chapecó/SC regarding their experience of being outside the domain of knowledge of their initial training? The results in- dicate that, although the formative itineraries are projected as an innovation, they reactivate mechanisms of regulation of teaching labor, furthering the fragmentation of school knowledge and intensifying the attribution of responsibility to teachers for the structural shortcomings of the educational system. We conclude that, in this scenario, teachers construct strategies of survival, occasional cooperation, and re-creation of knowledge, signaling both resistance and weariness in the face of imposed demands. This study also problematizes the need to recon- sider the institutional condition that sustain Brazilian secondary education, in order to ensure a meaningful space for language teaching knowledge within broader and historically situated formative processes.