Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil
Thesis: Singular ways and times of learning –possible paths for theteaching-learning of History promoting the inclusion of students with Intellectual Disabilities
Research supervisor: Dr. Sueli Salles Fidalgo

In the last decades, Brazil experienced a more intense participation with the international movement in defense of Inclusive Education that has reflected in the transformation of conceptions in the formulation of public educational policies, generating an increase in the presence of students with disabilities and/or with specific educational needs in the regular school. Given that currently more than 80% of these students attend regular classrooms, new questions and potentialities for the realization of a solidary and inclusive school culture has emerged from the concrete practices lived within the schools that receive these students. However, teachers, principals and the academic community have already presented research and reflections that advocate that the presence of students with disabilities in school and in the regular classroom does not always inspire changes in discourses or teaching practices. Thus, in some places, we arewitnessing a sort of inclusion-exclusion that is present in the classroom: many of the students with disabilities remain ignored, running out of the supports they need for a meaningful teaching-learning process.

It is also important to emphasize that even in schools that present a serious proposal of inclusion for these students, projects are currently threatened by the scrapping and instability generated by the implementation of rash educational public policies, especially since the approval of the Constitutional Proposal 55 in December 2016 during the transitional government, which froze expenses for essential areas such as education and health for twenty years. Such disastrous policies have been announced on a daily basis almost without interruption for the last couple of years, announcing the loss of fundamental rights, not only of those students who are experiencing a difficult process of social-school inclusion, but also for the school community as a whole, insofar as they ignore elementary social functions of the school, such as those aimed at building and enhancing autonomies and freedoms. Facing this scenario, the school where our research is carried out, situated in São Paulo, despite having a sensitive political pedagogical project aiming at an inclusive school culture, faces a series of concrete constraints in terms of time, space and knowledge needs for carrying out practices that enable effective participation of students with disabilities.
At school, based on the difficulties and potential of teaching and learning of these students observed and built in collaboration with their teachers, we assume as fundamental in our investigation, the work with students with Intellectual Disability (DI). Some of the reasons are: 1) they constitute the majority of enrollments of students with disabilities; 2) in greater quantity, sometimes they constitute a group isolated from the rest of the class; 3) because many still do not autonomously master the written language, sometimes do not carry out the records, activities or evaluations, since the teacher does not have the time and/or does not know how to adapt the lesson, the material and the evaluation; 4) even without performing activities, they pass from year to year due to a tendency to non-disapproval, but they remains without access and without stimulus in relation to the constructed knowledge and the socialization lived in class. There are other issues that unfold from these topics, but it is interesting in this letter to point out the nexus between the questions that mobilize our research and the motivations to present it for discussion at 8th ISCAR / SU 2019.

From what we consider criteria of credibility of the investigation, in the Research Group where we work, ILCAE – Federal University of São Paulo, the presentation in congresses and other research groups for the critical elaboration of the pairs and the exchange of perceptions about the theme is fundamental. In this case, the presentation of the project at 8th ISCAR / SU 2019 would not only serve to provide critical insights into what has been constructed up to now, but given the stage of development of the intervention at the school we are currently experiencing, but also about the paths that can be followed.

We consider that the presentations, lectures and exchanges of ideas will contribute to this research, not only with regard to a methodology to be used for the researcher’s reflection, but mainly and more importantly, that participation in this event will contribute to the composition of pedagogical interventions to benefit of students with intellectual disabilities, of their teachers and their families who are looking forward to an integrated social-school inclusion process, from which they can also participate actively, knowing about and stimulating their development.
We think that the impact of this event on this research can be great, insofar as we assume, as advocated by Vygotsky (1934), that method is a prerequisite and product, instrument and result of a study that should not be just theorized, but also experienced. We believe that by living spaces aimed at building knowledge under the perspective of historical-cultural theory, together with people with different experiences in the elaboration of pedagogical practices in the sense of social justice, we can also impregnate our discourses and practices by returning to tesis writing and the our schools. We also intend to contribute with the presentation of potentialities of the work under a historical-cultural perspective in Brazilian schools, in what refers to the paths followed in spite of the conditioning factors of the reality of the political-material world that compete against the processes of emancipation of individuals.

However, it would be very useful to participate for the first time in an international congress of this magnitude and to contribute to academic-cultural exchanges, and immensely pleasurable to do so in Russia, specifically at the Moscow State University of Psychology and Education, place where so many great works have originated, and where studies that inspire us so much in theoretical-reflexive experiences and pedagogical practices in the sense of social justice have been carried out.