Crítica e política em Paulo Freire: investigação para uma práxis da libertação em psicologia escolar e educacional

Abstract

The aim of this master's thesis is to point out and build theoretical and practical elements that underpin the psychologist's work in public schools as a praxis of liberation, based on a dialogical synthesis between Paulo Freire's early writings and productions in School and Educational Psychology. In order to do this, it was first necessary to revisit the history of the critical movement in this field of psychological knowledge and, secondly, to analyze the content of the bibliographic production that addresses the work of school psychologists from a critical perspective. Once this was done, we had the necessary theoretical and epistemological conditions so that, methodologically equipped with both the historical-dialectical materialist theory and method and the theoretical-bibliographical outline, we could objectively and rigorously approach the totality of Freire's legacy with the aim of selecting the first books written from this set, guided by criteria pre-established by the authors. The process of reading and analyzing the selected books was guided by three articulated perspectives, namely: I) the theoretical-historical critique of school/educational psychology; II) the content reported in scientific productions dealing with the practice of psychology in public schools; III) the dialectical method. Throughout the discussion, we structured two dialectically articulated articles, which unveil the contributions of Freirean thought to the practice of psychology in public schools and to the critical perspective, as well as emphasizing critical-political elements as structuring a way of doing-knowing education and school psychology on Brazilian soil. In the first article, we aim to discuss the political implications of psychological practice in public educational institutions, dialectically mediated by theoretical elements of Freirean thought, drawing from it the following thematic nuclei: (a) Critical engagement; (b) Dialogical openness; (c) Loving ethics. These theoretical elements reveal to psychology new ways of acting in everyday school life and show that political action for liberation needs to advance in a way that is attentive to the institutional and historical limits of its time and, overcoming processes of alienation and reification, needs to assume the radical nature of human existence as a transformative and authentically humanizing praxis. In the second article, we sought to understand Freire's critical conception of education, thus reaching the respective thematic nuclei: (a) Problematization; (b) Investigative action; (c) Critical insertion. These elements show that a liberating praxis in the field of school and educational psychology can be revealed by proposing creative practices that refer to local particularities and the knowledge that school subjects already possess, since an educational action for liberation is incompatible with a psychology that, consciously or mystified, has been a practice of domination. To sum up, in our research we have developed criticism as a mediating element for knowledge of the school reality and politics as a transforming element of this same reality. Therefore, they are dialectically correlated: neither can politics be justified without criticism, nor does criticism make sense if it is not driven by politics, and both theoretical categories need to be inscribed as concrete praxis.