The reinvention of school from a founding experience in a hospital

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to reflect on the importance of the narrative method and of the pedagogical listening to the construction of alternative discourses to the hegemonic messages in education, construction which is to be achieved through teachers' investigation of their own practice. By listening to hospitalized children, and based on readings of Walter Benjamin, this text proposes to challenge the thinking that has dominated the educational scene in Brazil. Even though this hegemonic thinking may have us believe there are no alternatives, the proposals for reforms are varied and refute the ideology disseminated by the media. Such reforms spring from the base of society and are articulated to popular segments whose protagonists are the educators. The founding experiences both inside and outside of public schools seek to respond to the changes of our times. The society of media information and visual bombardment gives up reflecting on and carefully analyzing the cultural and educational production that invade it, reproducing as dogmas the parlance produced by the media. What is the place for excluded individuals in a society of the spectacle? In a society that promises easy profits, rapid celebrity and knowledge without learning? Amidst the complex informational culture of disconnected discourses, what seems to be usual for most hospitalized children in Brazil is that they are marked by the cycle of poverty, exclusion and absence of anybody who, allowing them to speak, listens to their voices. It can be concluded that listening to the narrative of the excluded has consequently implications to the expansion of educational experiences that can tell a different story: that of a more humanized world.