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School, Being student, contemporaneity, technologies and social media.
As teacher of basic education acting on the teaching public net, we face several situations that catch our attention, from absences to forgetting and equation of statistics and goals. Problems arise, remain, and the school continues to be the same for those depending on it. Various speeches tend to improve teaching quality and minimize issues on evasion, accessibility, inclusion, technologies’ use, modernizing spaces and connecting subjects through decrees, laws, norms, ordinances or specific actions developed by school community. However, when entering spaces and stepping on school ground, we realize that such speeches remain around the debate and just a few of them get out of paper, since reality reveals something different from what is thought. This makes us think about the student on this contemporary and modern context and his relations with technologies and social media inside or outside classroom. This study comes from this wish of looking to the student, space, and his real and virtual relationships. Therefrom considering the student in contemporary context from how we perceive him inside school daily routine and links established with their peers and teachers mediated by technologies’ use and social media. Starting from concerns experienced in classroom and observations about the use of media and technologies at school, whether with cell phones, including its prohibition, or even by the teacher’s use of data show, we were awaken for a series of questions that led us to place the subject, space and his daily school routine. But, the main lead question for this study corresponds to what senses are attributed to school’s action as a social whole. If, at one hand, school is desired for allowing opportunities, on the other hand, it is rejected for imposing rules, boundaries, and discipline. Based on this concern, it is important to understand the student today from the way we perceive him in school routine and the relationship between technologies and social networks intertwined in this process, in a public school in the state public network of Paraíba. We are aware of the importance of public schools for peripheral communities, how they are present and, in many cases, how they become the only studying alternative. It is necessary thinking it not only as a space for applying rules, contents, and discipline, but as a place that allows growth, discoveries, and teachings valuable for life. Our impressions became possible only due to the tools used which, throughout data collection, were suited to research field and subjects, enabling a dynamic study. Therefore, we used ethnography since it allowed us to understand the studied phenomena from an inside perspective, through direct interaction with the studied group, deciphering, interpreting, and understanding codes and meanings of subjects in focus. Thus, reflecting about this “being student” in contemporary times, inserted in a public school context and observing their relationships with technologies and social media it is thinking about them beyond school limits and, at the same time, seeing the student as an existential and mutant being which adapts on his own way, to spaces, relationships, and situations that emerge throughout his school formation.