Língua, trabalho e capital: movimentos de ressignificação sobre o trabalho do sujeito-professor de língua portuguesa no discurso oficial

Abstract

We analyze, within the Graduate Program in Linguistic Studies (PPGEL) at the Federal University of Fronteira Sul (UFFS), Chapecó campus (SC), the processes of resignification concerning the work of the Portuguese language teacher-subject in official discourse on the teaching of this language in upper secondary education within the state public school system of Santa Catarina. This research is justified by the need to understand how official discourses produce effects on this work and update meanings under different conditions of production. To this end, we draw on materialist discourse theory, in articulation with the History of Linguistic Ideas as developed in Brazil. Our research question was: how has the work of the Portuguese language teacher-subject been resignified in official discourse on the teaching of this language in upper secondary education? To address this question, we established the following specific objectives: to historicize the official documents that constitute the research archive as educational instruments; to analyze how meanings concerning the work of the Portuguese language teacher-subject in upper secondary education have been resignified in relation to conceptions of language and its teaching; and to understand which imaginaries emerge from official discourse regarding the work of this teacher-subject. Methodologically, this is a qualitative-interpretative study in which we constructed the research archive based on four versions of curricular documents from the state of Santa Catarina addressing language teaching at the upper secondary level, published between 1991 and 2021. From this archive, we extracted discursive sequences, organized into two discursive excerpts that constitute the corpus of analysis. These excerpts are composed of regularities that allowed us to analyze movements of resignification of the work of the Portuguese language teacher-subject, emerging within a given socio-historical formation and within a memory framework, enabling us to understand possible shifts in meaning. Such movements point to possible shifts in the modes of identification and individuation of the work of the Portuguese language teacher- subject—from the traditional subject position to that of mediator, and from this to that of manager and entrepreneur—as well as to a policy of memory regarding the teaching of Portuguese. Our analysis shows that an imaginary of language as homogeneous, adaptable, and functional—realized through its use—emerges from official discourse, sustained by the theoretical-political confrontation-alliance among logicist, sociological, and psychological approaches, thereby instituting a policy of memory for Portuguese language teaching centered on the predictability of meanings. In this context, the work of the teacher-subject is resignified within a discursive formation of flexibility, management, and entrepreneurship, producing the erasure of its material and historical conditions and silencing the constitutive contradiction between capital and labor. These movements of resignification emerge as ideological effects that interpellate and individuate the Portuguese language teacher-subject to assume different subject positions, particularly in relation to capital and its maintenance and reproduction, in accordance with what a neoliberal ideological formation determines, thereby naturalizing pedagogical practices oriented toward technique. In this sense, in addition to pointing to shifts in the modes of identification and individuation of the work of the teacher-subject, this research contributes to denaturalizing taken-for-granted assumptions, opening space for interpretive gestures that may function as forms of intervention capable of producing fissures in stabilized meanings, reinscribing the work of the teacher-subject and Portuguese language teaching as a historical, political, and intellectual practice.