The school as a development context: An ecological study in a riverine community on the Marajó Island

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the school of a riverine community, aiming to analyze it as a context for the development of children and adolescents living there, in view of their interactions with their contexts, from their perspective, their parents and teacher. Taking into account a theoretical-methodological perspective in line with the principles of the Bioecological Approach to Human Development (TBDH), this study reports a research that used the Ecological Insertion method, which privileges the insertion of researchers in the research environment, with the objective of evaluating the processes of interaction of people with the context in which they are developing. The research evidenced the link between almost all the systems involved that could limit or foster the development of children and adolescents attending school. The analysis started from the school microsystem, considering as a mesosystem, the school-family relationship and as an exosystem, the school-city relationship. A teacher and two classes participated in this study. Data were collected through inventories, interviews, observations, and field notes. In general, particularities of the physical and social environment of the school were verified, as well as possible factors involved in the proximal processes and the characteristics of the people involved. We analyzed the routines of three families with children in school; parents’ conceptions about education, their idealizations for the future of their children, and aspects of family organization that might be interfering with their children’s involvement in school. The data showed that routine activities interfered with the frequency of children in school, constituting reasons for absences and school dropouts; and the development raised by the subjects of the study due to the presence of the school in that context seems to be restricted to reading, writing, and basic mathematical operations. The research presented here was developed in a non-urban context, difficult to access due to its location and lack of systematic transportation to the site. However, its accomplishment was facilitated by the application of the Ecological Insertion methodology based mainly on the interaction of the research team with the researched community. In this sense, the ecological insertion realized in the community endorsed the ecological validity of this research.