THE MANDATORY CURRICULAR INTERNSHIP IN CRITICAL SCHOOL/EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY: AN EXPERIENCE IN PIAUÍ

ABSTRACT

This article shares reflections about the construction of mandatory curricular internship in the field of School and Educational Psychology from a critical perspective. The internship is a privileged moment in training, as it brings theory and practice closer together, towards critical praxis, a central aspect of this psychological approach. In order to know how the experience of internship and supervision in the area has been constructed, interviews were conducted with an internship supervisor who works at a Public University of Piauí, given the relevance of his work and militancy, seeking to understand: the concepts and practices developed by the supervisor; the ethical-political crossings that emerge from the internship and supervision experience; and the elements of criticality that mark such an experience. The article focuses on internship organization strategies, the role of supervision and the challenges experienced in the relationship between interns-school-supervisor. We hope to contribute to reflection on the challenges involved in building supervised internships in the area of School and Educational Psychology from a critical perspective, both in the field and in supervisory meetings.

Keywords: supervised internship; practical supervision; school psychology

RESUMO

Este artigo partilha reflexões acerca da construção do estágio obrigatório curricular no campo da Psicologia Escolar/Educacional em uma perspectiva crítica. O estágio é um momento privilegiado da formação, por aproximar teoria e prática, em direção à práxis crítica, aspecto central nessa abordagem psicológica. Visando conhecer como tem sido construída a experiência de estágio e supervisão na área, foram realizadas entrevistas com um supervisor de estágio que atua em uma Universidade Pública do Piauí, dada a relevância de sua atuação e militância, buscando compreender: as concepções e práticas desenvolvidas pelo supervisor; os atravessamentos ético-políticos que emergem da experiência de estágio e supervisão; e os elementos de criticidade que marcam tal experiência. O artigo põe em foco as estratégias de organização do estágio, o papel da supervisão e os desafios vivenciados na relação estagiários-escola-supervisor. Esperamos contribuir com a reflexão acerca dos desafios implicados na construção de estágios supervisionados na área de Psicologia Escolar e Educacional em uma perspectiva crítica, tanto no campo, quanto nos encontros de supervisão.

Palavras-chave: estágio supervisionado; supervisão prática; psicologia escolar

RESUMEN

Este artículo intercambia reflexiones acerca de la construcción de la pasantía obligatoria curricular en el campo de la Psicología Escolar/Educacional en una perspectiva crítica. La pasantía es un momento privilegiado de la formación, por acercar teoría y práctica, en dirección a la praxis crítica, aspecto central en ese abordaje psicológico. Visando conocer de qué forma ha sido construida la experiencia de pasantía y supervisión en el área, se realizaron entrevistas con un supervisor de pasantía que actúa en una Universidad Pública da Piauí, dada la relevancia de su actuación y militancia, buscando comprender: las concepciones y prácticas desarrolladas por el supervisor; los atravesamientos ético-políticos que surgen de la experiencia de pasantía y supervisión; y los elementos de criticidad que marcan tal experiencia. El artículo pone de relieve las estrategias de organización de la pasantía, el papel de la supervisión y los desafíos vivenciados en la relación alumno en formación-escuela-supervisor. Esperamos contribuir con la reflexión acerca de los desafíos implicados en la construcción de pasantías tuteladas en el área de Psicología Escolar y Educacional en una perspectiva crítica, en el campo y en los encuentros de supervisión.

Palabras clave: pasantía tutelada; supervisión práctica; psicología escolar

INTRODUCTION

This article aims to share reflections about the construction of the mandatory curricular internship in the field of School/Educational Psychology guided by the critical theoretical-practical framework, taking as a case an experience carried out in Piauí.

The mandatory curricular internship can be a moment of great potential in the training process, given its theoretical-practical character: in it, students have the experience with the professional performance universe and can have, in supervision, a space to reflect about the challenges experienced in the field. In the case of School and Educational Psychology, the contact of Psychology students with the educational institutions tends to mobilize instigating questions, such as, for example, what to do with the most common demands. This debate takes on a specific outline depending on the theoretical framework that guides supervision. From the theoretical diversity in the area, we highlight the critical perspective, an approach that encourages the dialectical encounter among theories and the concrete educational reality.

In order to learn about the basic internship experiences in this area and the approach, a Doctoral research was carried out, in which six supervisors were interviewed (Teles, 2019). In this article, we focus on the interview with a supervisor from the Northeast, betting on the relevance of publicizing experiences that are located outside the Southeast and South, regions of the country that have been privileged in the dissemination of research in scientific journals.

Initially, we made considerations about the supervised internship, articulating it with the critical debate in the field of School and Educational Psychology. Next, we present the research, in its ethical and theoretical-methodological aspects. Finally, we share themes addressed in the interview, in dialogue with the bibliography. The expectation is to contribute to reflection on the challenges involved in the critical theoretical-practical construction of supervised internships in School and Educational Psychology, both experienced in the field and in supervisory meetings.

The basic internship and School and Educational Psychology in a critical perspective

The supervised basic internship, given its specificities, is usually the focus of debates in training in various areas. By defining it as a supervised educational act developed in the work environment, the Internship Law (Law No. 11,788/2008) seeks to overcome the utilitarian, dichotomous and pragmatic conception prevailing until then. Still, the idea of “knowledge in use” or the place where theory grounds practice is expressive.

In this debate, the reflections of Pimenta and Lima (2006) about teacher education seem salutary to us. For the authors, the internship is not “the time for practice”, but for praxis. While they criticize that “practice for the sake of practice and the use of techniques without due reflection can reinforce the illusion that there is a practice without theory or a theory disconnected from the practice” (p. 10), they highlight the need for reflection as part of the experience, in which the role of theory and supervision stands out. As for supervision, Assis and Rosado (2012), inserted in the field of Social Work, argue that the supervisor is responsible, in the relationship with the interns, “to exercise and qualify the interventional practice, enabling the elaboration of the synthesis of the teaching-learning process, the formation of an investigative posture and a critical and propositional position in the face of social reality” (p. 206).

Thus conceived, the internship is the dialectic unit that provides a practice based on theory in confrontation with reality. Interrelated, theory and practice can be recreated. By combining theoretical foundations, supervision and intervention in the field, the internship also becomes powerful for the production of knowledge and reflection about the profession. In other words, the internship can redimension, in action, the praxis involved in the epistemological, ethical and political identity profession construction, anchoring both the overcoming of instrumental logic and the process of reframing knowledge.

Thinking specifically about the psychologists’ training in Brazil, Cury and Ferreira Neto (2014) point out that, throughout history, internships have not always been critically understood. Characterized, in the context of the profession regulation as an application of knowledge or a complement that “exemplifies”, the role of internships gradually changed, with the approval of the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCN) for Psychology courses (Resolution No. 8/2004) being a milestone. Such Guidelines represent a change of greater scope, altering the concept of the minimum curriculum. In the DCN, internships are seen as training activities, programmed and supervised by responsible teachers, belonging to the training institution, who are responsible for consolidating and articulating the expected skills. Being part of a curriculum, the internship is inserted in the context of the ethical-political project of training in the area, with all its implications (CFP, 2013).

If the construction of supervised internships sensitive to these precautions is a challenge that crosses several professions, as well as other areas of Psychology, we are interested in thinking about a specific field, School and Educational Psychology, and, within it, from a specific theoretical framework, the critical perspective. In this, sense, Maria Helena Souza Patto’s work is considered a milestone, in particular the books Psicologia e Ideologia: uma crítica à Psicologia escolar (1984), the result of her doctoral thesis, and A Produção do Fracasso Escolar: histórias de submissão e rebeldia (1990), resulting from Free Teaching. This psychologist is a precursor of the self-criticism movement, through which the area began to build and consolidate new directions, both from a theoretical and practical point of view.

Patto makes essential contributions to the critical understanding of school failure, diligently pointing out, based on a critical literature review in the area, the role of dominant Psychology in the production and dissemination of individualizing and blaming explanations in relation to the phenomenon. With this, schooling difficulties are justified as resulting from the supposed deficiency or individual disorder or from the family and social environment of the students, which the psychologist is responsible for diagnosing and treating. A critical analysis of the Psychology history points to its central role in defending the theses of congenital or acquired inferiority of people belonging to the poorer classes.

Patto’s notes focus on the historical, political, economic, social, cultural, institutional and relational determinations that permeate schooling. Such elements grow in relevance in a country marked by predatory colonization and by the slavery and genocide of native peoples and blacks.

The strength of these criticisms is the birthplace of School and Educational Psychology from a critical perspective in Brazil. In fact, from the mid-1990s, its fertilized a theoretical-practical production, from which we highlight Machado e Souza (1997), Tanamachi, Proença e Rocha (2000), Meira e Antunes (2003a; 2003b), Souza (2007) and Machado, Lerner and Fonseca (2017). In general, this set questions the forces that engender the maintenance of exclusion in school practices and assumes the commitment to contribute to overcoming oppression. The effort is to overcome a reductionist and simplifying view, towards repairing the production process of school failure and intervening in the network of relations that produce students who do not learn at school (Souza, 2002). Thus, the gaze turns to all the people involved in the school complaint, seeking to break crystallizations in a field of forces of which we are part (Souza, 2007). Finally, coherently, contrary to the claim to be generic and abstract, such an approach understands that theory and practice are rooted in local reality.

More than 30 years after the first critical publications by Patto (1984), it is important to understand how School and Educational Psychology in a critical perspective has contributed to the basic training of psychologists, taking internship supervision as a fertile space for analysis. Below, we present the research carried out.

THE CASE STUDY: TEXTURES AND METHODOLOGICAL STRATEGIES

In order to know how the basic supervised internship in School and Educational Psychology has been built from a critical perspective, the research adopted the qualitative case study method as proposed by André (1984). As an excerpt, this article will present an interview with a single internship supervisor. From the vast literature that attests to the quality of case studies with only one witness, Ecléa Bosi (2003) and Maria Helena Souza Patto (2009) deserve to be highlighted, especially for the ethical-political choice of listening to common people and even socially devalued people.

Participated in the research Fauston Negreiros. The choice to interview him was due to some articulated reasons: his work as a supervisor of basic internships in the area; its theoretical belonging - the critical perspective; its geographical position - the State of Piauí; and his acceptance to participate. Finally, breaking the centrality of the Southeast in a significant part of the theoretical production in this field, his Lattes curriculum attests to a considerable production, including work in prestigious entities in the area.

Inserted in one of the states most marked by inequality and poverty in the country, whose historical determinations are known, Fauston has built his work resisting the lack of incentives and the discriminatory regionalism that still mark Universities and Psychology. Avoiding abstracting the deponent and his statement from his socio-historical context, an aspect he even emphasized in the interview, we take on the challenge of thinking about the plurality, or rather, the inequalities of Brazilian realities, and recognizing their impacts in light of the structural and dynamic conditions specific.

As a research procedure, semi-structured interviews were carried out, as they escaped the imposition of questions, although guided by a basic scheme (Bosi, 2003). Fauston was invited to speak, in a type of meeting in which he was not seen as an informant, but as an interlocutor. Thus, two interviews were conducted in 2017, totaling 3 hours and 36 minutes recorded.

It is worth noting that, in addition to complying with Resolution 510/2016, ethical concerns accompanied the entire process: from the initial conversation, to presenting the research, to concluding the thesis, and even during the writing of this article, the interviewee was invited to give his opinion and respected in their decisions. We understand that guaranteeing access to the project, the interview transcription and the analysis favors the bond of trust and minimizes possible misinterpretations. In this sense, in addition to sensitive listening, we are willing to take care of sensitive writing and its effects (Machado, 2008).

An internship supervisor in the semi-arid region: personal and formative trajectory

Fauston Negreiros was born and spent his childhood and part of his youth in the rural area of São Raimundo Nonato, a town in the interior of Piauí, approximately 500 km from the capital of one of the poorest states in the country. According to sharing, the interest in Psychology was awakened from literature and cinema, passions since youth. He highlighted films by Polanski, Almodóvar, Scorsese and Kubrick, as well as the book Grande Sertão Veredas, by Guimarães Rosa (the latter, given the identification with his peasant origin), inspiring his curiosity for human complexity.

He studied Psychology at the State University of Piauí, being a student of the third Psychology class in the entire state. Thus, his training was lived in a course in the process of being structured, as the teaching staff at the time was entirely composed of substitute teachers, and the internship field was built by the initiative of students and teachers in dialogue with the institutions.

Although accustomed to several areas of Psychology, the deponent reports, in a long speech, how his interest in School and Educational Psychology arose, still in graduation:

School Psychology seems to have connected the dots in various aspects of my concerns: social commitment, ethical, reflective, political practice. So for me it was a great date. I can report my encounter with the School Psychology in search of new directions, organized by Marilene Proença and Adriana Marcondes. I was enchanted, I read it and found it very believable, I liked the way it was written and I laughed. Because I saw those children! They were the first readings that I saw pulsating what I saw in the spaces. I read Developmental Psychology classics and they didn’t seem like real children to me. It didn’t seem believable. I was full of reticence, I found some even with a content of prejudice, racism, a distancing from reality. I didn’t see the child from the public school, the child from the Northeast, from Piauí... And when I read the ...new directions, it was a start: “this child here exists!”. Then I started looking for these authors, and ended up in the much-quoted work A Produção do Fracasso Escolar. I can tell you, even with a lot of emotion: when I read Patto, I saw myself inside the work as a former student, as a future psychologist... It mobilized me a lot of rebellion. There I saw that I wanted to be a school psychologist. In bookstores, my attention was directed to School Psychology, it ceased to be academic reading, it became delight.

Fauston recounts his first experience in the area, when he was an undergraduate intern. In the basic internship, he took on the challenge of proposing a critical approach, opposing the current clinical model in the locus school of the internship. With the school’s adhesion, he continued there in the specific internship, being the first student to choose to emphasize the school field. As soon as he graduated, he was hired by the same school where he interned. In his words:

I presented a critical stage, denying the model I had there, including a physical space that I had attached to the school, I had to book in advance and pay a fee. And I did the internship inserted in the school routine, walking through the corridors, making partnerships with other disciplines, articulating groups with students, with the pedagogical team, intervening directly with the management, thinking about demands of a collective nature...

Fauston was also a professor at a private college, as well as a substitute at the institution where he graduated, until he was approved as a professor at the Federal University of Piauí (UFPI), an institution where he works on an exclusive dedication basis. At UFPI, among other functions, Fauston is supervisor of compulsory basic internship, working in the field of Education. Next, we address their reflections on this experience.

In the construction of the internship, the ethical-political commitment to the school

According to Fauston, at his institution, each supervisor is responsible for up to 12 interns, enrolled in the mandatory internship curriculum component (with 60 hours).

Although there is a workload of four hours per week of activities in locus, this workload is negotiated based on the needs of the school, so that it can be closer to its daily life. The fact of being a professor at a public university with exclusive dedication allows greater exchange with the field, an aspect that is difficult in private Higher Education institutions, which do not always include these hours in the professor’s salary.

Fauston reports that he goes to the school every week, both to build a reference for his work with the institution and to assess with the team the effects of the interns’ presence. Being that reference, in addition to guaranteeing an internship field, is to sustain the praxis in a dynamic reality, based on the commitment to fight for a democratic and quality school. As for the structure of the stage, he sums it up as follows:

We usually carry out an institutional survey: a study of the school’s physical structure, pedagogical and relational dynamics of the various social actors involved. He listens to the various subjects at the school, how each one understands the demands and which would be a priority for intervention. And it will operate by groups of students, groups of teachers and other professionals (secretary technicians, lunch ladies, general services, security guards). So, try to elect demands that can integrate everyone, as well as unique demands in each microgroup. We agree on a half-yearly intervention plan, which is not a prison, it is built and evaluated throughout the process by all the people involved. And in the subsequent semester, we evaluate again the demands of that moment, what was executed, what was only sensitized and requires improvement, new interventions, and what was unsuccessful.

In this relatively concise synthesis, Fauston summarizes many guidelines present in the various critical references in the area, especially the two books that, as he tells us, mobilized his insertion in this field (Machado & Souza, 1997; Patto, 1990). Thus, the institutional perspective appears in the intervention plan, which involves knowing the dynamics, structure and relationships, including listening to all school actors: They seek to pay attention to the integral dimension of the demand, without losing the unique perspective of those who produce. We emphasize, as fundamental, the continuity of the work, even with the change of interns, with previous experience being the focus of evaluation and planning.

The role of the internship supervisor

Invited to talk about the formative process present in the weekly supervision, Fauston declares that he seeks to work from the concrete dimensions in a dialectical way, as a strategy to mobilize the debate between the theoretical constructs and the work demands for the school psychologist. Initially, using the bibliography, he hypothesizes common demands, provoking the interns to reflect on ways to intervene without blaming students for schooling difficulties. He says:

It is a professional equation that does not naturalize blaming failure. It is the discussion of the commitment around an education of integral development of the subject. And I’m going to focus on the concrete: what aspects of the legislative scope cross the school? How is the pedagogical political project going? What’s political about him? What’s pedagogical? The fictitious floor plan of the school is the supervision agenda. The teachers’ historicization, their training. Not to shift blame to the teacher, which is also a strong trend.

The construction of this work is neither simple nor linear, especially considering the dominant force of traditional readings in the training of psychologists. Fauston reports, in a long statement, something very common in the experience with interns:

At the first moment, they have an enormous energy, observing with a sharp critical sense that is frightening, because it borders on a catastrophic analysis, of observing an immensity of defects in the school, in all the people who are part of it. Our semester lasts between three and four months, so let’s say that in the first month they have their noses in the air, analyzing and criticizing everything. In the second moment, when we start to check the priorities, raise demands and put together an action plan, I also see a lot of energy. But when it comes to building these practices, they flirt a lot with the model of technical, clinical psychology... So, this difficulty in organizing an action plan that will expand learning, promote development, improve the quality of that space. They want to get away from the specific reading of School Psychology, then clinical booklets start to appear, they want to resort to manuals or other literature that is incompatible, even with what we defend. It makes you want to laugh, but it’s their movement and I respect it, I don’t have any attitude of censorship. In fact, I try to bring it in a positive way, analyze and reflect. I present the contradictions and we build.

In the statement, the risk of interns falling back into a critical understanding that produces disbelief or delegitimization of the social importance of the school appears. It is not difficult to envision this nihilistic reading, since it is not difficult for them to have lived or witnessed bad experiences at school, with reports of negative effects that marked their school trajectories being common, including at university (Goldstein, Demouliere, Santos, & Mosqueira, 2021). The problems of education, and in particular of public schools, are exhaustively publicized in various instances. It is not rare, in the debate, for the explanation of these problems to be captured by a logic that conceals its structural issues, reducing them to an individualizing, meritocratic, discriminatory and blaming logic (Patto, 1990). Furthermore, Psychology retains paradigms that are averse to a critical perspective. Thus, the clinical model or recipes present in psychologizing manuals and techniques, seen as practical, flirt with intervention proposals in a critical perspective, bringing relevant challenges to the internship supervisor and interns, future professionals.

The idea of “putting out fires” is popularized as a metaphor, given the complexity of school life. Faced with a dynamic in which different instances intertwine, ranging from administrative to pedagogical, relational and political, it is not uncommon for interns and psychologists to experience chaos on the school place. In addition, frustration with projects that do not fully materialize is frequent. If the direction of work does not belong to the team of psychologists and interns, but is a collective part, sharing such experiences can provoke reflections, worked on in supervision.

In managing learning situations, it is up to the supervisor to face the challenge of sustaining the inseparable theory-practice relation, contributing to critical education. From the supervisor-trainee-school relation, Fauston provokes: “The school psychologist’s look is not just to denounce, but to announce effective actions for all social actors, not just for an individual”.

In this context, Fauston points out that it is essential to rethink the common conception among interns of “teaching resistance” to the work of school psychologists. Let’s see:

Some trainees always want to label this resistance in a negative way, “the teacher is resisting because he is not flexible, he is traditional, he practices incorrectly”. Others think that the teacher does not respect Psychology. That’s every semester! I try to say that it could be that, but it could be a thousand things. The teacher even has the right not to accept that student who shows up at school one day to observe his class. This has to be earned. Interestingly, when they manage to “overcome” this barrier, they are amazed, “the teacher is now a partner”. So, I take this issue, not to face this resistance only from the negative side. Analogously, indiscipline ends up being seen very rigidly as wrong, but it can also be the manifestation of rebellion and resistance to a traditional, repetitive, violent practice.

Often, the idea of teacher “resistance” loses sight of its understanding in a political, critical and emancipatory bias. However, the analysis of so-called resistance on the part of teachers to the work of psychologists can reveal how much it is an effect of psychologists’ own work in education, often marked by a vertical relation and why not say authoritarian? Along with Giroux (1986), we understand resistance beyond denial, overcoming the desire for subservience and passivity that sometimes psychologists expect from people involved in building school life.

The challenges of building critical practices in the current context

For Fauston, there are many challenges for the construction of the internship in the field of School and Educational Psychology from a critical perspective. Initially, most educational institutions are unaware of the specificities of the role of the school psychologist:

This refers to society’s understanding of psychologists in general. It’s delicate, because the school ends up not demanding the psychologist’s role because they don’t know what he does. It’s a challenge. Ant work! Each year, we present what the internship is to the school’s management team, because of the high turnover of the teaching staff, more than half of which are temporary. Sometimes you’re at school with a teacher who did a really cool job during the year and the next year he’s not there anymore. Thinking about this great flow of changes, we have to revitalize what School Psychology is all the time. I think that the school psychologist has to assert his place on a daily basis. But they view our work with great respect, with great appreciation.

The everyday affirmation to which he refers goes beyond the construction of the School Psychologist’s identity and the critical paradigm consolidation in the understanding of school phenomena. It is also about not succumbing to the adaptationist, adjustment and classification models rooted in Psychology that flirt with trainees throughout their training. Overcoming this model implies critically guiding it, both with interns and with the internship field. In this regard, Fauston problematizes the way we have commonly dialogued with traditional perspectives and technical models, as we are not always able to affect peers to reflect on the implications of our ethical-political role in the school context.

The demand issue for psychologist’s work at school is complex and the focus of a fertile debate. In the specific case of clinical demand, both in Meira and Antunes (2003b) and in Souza (2007) we find contributions from several authors about how to welcome the demand, without necessarily meeting or refusing it. Sensitively differentiating real demands from medicalizing demands and assisting when referral is necessary is part of the duties of the internship supervisor, along with his/her team of interns and the school. Says Fauston:

When an eminently clinical demand appears, we listen, welcome and seek to operationalize from an intersectoral practice. Therefore, it is important to set up a floor plan around the school, seeing if there are CRAS, CAPS nearby. So, we make a link and continue to promote actions in relation to the daily life of the school. It’s not just referrals, we provide support on a daily basis.

In this sense, it is not a matter of refusing the clinic, but delimiting the school and educational psychologist’s work from a critical perspective. In this sense, it is an ethical responsibility to even contribute and create conditions so that demands of any nature (clinical, social, assistance, health, etc.) can be accepted and forwarded, if applicable. In this regard, Machado (2014) has many contributions, implied both in the way interns fit into the school, even in the writing of reports and other documents.

Another challenge highlighted by Fauston is linked to his origin and territorial belonging: he is concerned with expanding the regional diversity of School Psychology literature from a critical perspective. Recognizing the pioneering spirit of the South and Southeast, references for his life, he emphasizes the need for greater attention to regional specificities:

The students report with joy: “Teacher, there is a very nice model in Maringá, in São Paulo, why don’t we follow it?”. But, at the same time, they still miss productions that refer to their reality. Many critical School Psychology texts are still about the reality of the South and Southeast, which does not always correspond, in terms of physical structure and dynamics, to the Northeastern reality. Here, in some schools, the physical structure is really precarious: the sun shines on half of the room, there is no pedagogical coordinator... In Piauí, there are schools that have only a director, a secretary and one teacher per room. The secretary and the director go out to organize the lunch... So, I always do these reflections and analysis.

Inserted in these specificities, a major challenge for the construction of the internship involves the precariousness of some schools in their region. If it is true that precariousness crosses Brazilian public schools from North to South of the country, each place has its singularities, which must be recognized. Thus, Fauston reports an intense experience, in a multigrade rural school, giving us the dimension of this complexity:

It is challenging because we see a series of issues denied by government officials. The school had a security guard and the teacher, who was also the school manager, and who swept the room. There, there was the opportunity to make very strong bonds, to know the life story, the training. And the parents, we saw that they were betting everything on the children, they took them to school hand in hand, or on a donkey, on a bicycle. A whole school with 6, 10 students. So, the teacher’s bond with the students, the degree of involvement, ended up being much greater. Because they spent the day at school, the bus would leave in the morning and would only pick up in the afternoon. This experience made it possible to strongly reflect on the role of the State in the formation of people, in the lack of commitment to education. To what extent does keeping the rural school precarious have the intention of reproducing the logic of classes? It was a very valuable experience, because many of our students come from private schools. But it was difficult, both for me as a supervisor and for the interns. Due to the distance, there was no way to be there twice a week...

This experience calls upon Psychology to assume a commitment in the struggle to guarantee the right to public, free and quality education for all. Disregarding the political dimension produces practices that are dissociated from objective conditions, as well as contributing to feed back this perverse gear that produces inequalities.

Another challenge pointed out by the deponent involves typical limitations of the mandatory curricular internship, given its punctual nature. Therefore, the search for guaranteeing more time in the construction of internships in the area, at its University. Here’s what he tells us:

I feel the need for more time for intervention. If they were one-year internships, we could expand the actions much more, as well as the training process itself. These are limitations of the internship itself. Based on students’ reports and schools’ demand, we had support to take the demand for a professional internship in School Psychology to the Structuring Teaching Nucleus, which will be inserted now, with the curricular reform.

In addition, the ever-increasing bottleneck of resources affecting Public Universities compromises their basic functioning and favors their dismantling. In this sense, this is how Fauston sees funding for research and participation in events disappear, as well as basic materials, while he feels the weight of the work intensification. Such aspects impact the autonomy and training offered, calling our department help to develop survival strategies.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

On December 12, 2019, Law No. 13,935/2019was enacted, which provides for the provision of psychology services in public Basic Education networks. As a result, public schools in all municipalities in the country tend to receive psychologists hired under this law, who will become part of school life.

This scenario reinforces an old concern, especially considering that, in the current context, School and Educational Psychology is an undervalued and still disputed area in the training of psychologists in a country of continental dimensions and marked by brutal inequalities, even within each municipality (Souza et al., 2020). Thus, critical perspectives are not always included as a basic reference in curricula, and it is common for their adoption to come from the initiative of professors in the area. In this sense, greater attention should be paid to the training offered in the area, especially with regard to internship opportunities, due to the potential to articulate theory and practice in an embodied way.

From the conversation with Fauston, it is possible to notice the recognition of concrete challenges for the construction of an effectively critical performance in the field of School and Educational Psychology, against which many forces compete. In addition to some regional specificities, it is also possible to identify challenges experienced in other regions and states of the country. Thus, their experience can contribute to other realities, including in the sense of provoking reflections about what is specific to them and what is common.

Present on the national scene as a whole, and lived in Fauston’s experience, it is possible to state that school actors are unaware of the role of the school psychologist, exceeding in relevance the precariousness of the reality of educational institutions, whose needs are often basic order and point to the dehumanization with which its actors are treated. In addition, the still dominant presence of individualizing views and practices in training flirts with interns, a situation that increases as the internship moves from observation and planning to the design of an intervention proposal. This is an old challenge, present since the germinal moments of criticism of traditional School and Educational Psychology in Brazil (Patto, 1984), and which accompanies the theoretical-practical construction of a critical perspective also in a seminal way (Machado e Souza, 1997; Souza, Silva, & Yamamoto, 2014).

Even when involved with criticism, from time to time interns feel inclined to carry out clinical or diagnostic practices, which, it is worth mentioning, immediately dialogue with the most common demands on the school place. The deconstruction of this trend is a process made of advances and retreats, which imply our (self)critical attention. Such provocation does not dissolve with graduation, since, in the world of work, the call for classical practices is still what sets the tone for the (dis)encounter between Psychology and Education. Therefore, a sensitive look at the theoretical-practical articulation must accompany the trained professional who intends to act critically in the area.

In this context, it is still important to reiterate that, although we have accumulated research and a dense literature in the critical perspective, part of which is cited in this article, we still live with conservative paradigms in this area, which authorizes us to characterize it as a disputed territory, composed of resistances and tensions. At the same time, we recognize that old impasses and challenges have not been overcome, a reality that, it is worth reiterating, is not restricted to Piauí or the northeast, but crosses Brazil.

For this reason, we put the term perspective in relief. Now, the epistemological and ethical framework on which School and Educational Psychology in a critical perspective is based is not an adjective of the type “to be or not to be”, but an “expectation, promise, possibility, horizon”. In this sense, the future corresponds more genuinely to what this movement seeks to add, both from the point of view of knowledge production and ethical-political actions. The challenges are launched. May we repair.

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• This article derives from a doctoral thesis carried out with financial support from CNPq.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  15 Jan 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  02 Nov 2020
• Accepted
  29 Oct 2021