School situations involving the religious issue: teaching resources and their origins

Abstract

The aim of this article is to identify and analyze the genesis of the resources used by teachers to deal with school situations, especially those related to the religious matter. The constitution of resources for teaching practice does not come only from professional experience, mainly in the Brazilian case, where there are no official rules or prescriptions for this subject. Thus, it is questioned: what are the resources mobilized by teachers in situations involving the religious question? What are the origins of these resources for action in real and often unpredictable situations? It is supposed that the action resources used in teaching practices are consistent with the plurality of references that constitute the teaching identity. Based on ethnographic interviews with eighteen teachers from Elementary School II in the State of São Paulo, 54 situations involving the religious question were collected. All the situations were analyzed in what concerns the resources used by the teachers. For this article four situations will be exposed, they were chosen because they are representative, and they serve to exemplify and to assist the argument developed here. To sum up, this paper reveals that the origin of the repertoires used in the teaching practice, as far as the religious question is concerned, comes from the personal competences, which are closely associated with characteristics of the Brazilian socio-cultural configuration, such as the hybrid dispositions of habitus and the mixture between public sphere and private sphere. All things considered, these aspects of the Brazilian culture culminate in the naturalization of the religious in the teaching practice.