Tramas do impedimento: os sentidos da desistência entre Alfabetizandos da EJA

For young people and adults that have not yet conquered reading and writing, being literate is the most important thing in life , a dream . Scholarly learning for them is like hegemonic knowledge in contemporary literate society. Thus, for them to get into school is to be able to have such knowledge and, through it, feel inserted into this society. However, along this process of learning, they start to drop out, little by little, statistically increasing the number of people who give up on young people and adult education Eja, as well as slowly reducing the contingent of illiteracy in the country. With this reality as a starting point, we question the concrete and symbolic reasons or motives that lead to a dropping out of the literacy classes at Eja. To do so, we have established, as the object of our study, the feelings of giving up among those involved in young people and adult literacy training. To understand such feelings is our purpose in this investigation. The theory of Social Representations (MOSCOVICI, 1978, 2004) was the theoretical-methodological option for subsidizing data search, analyses and interpretation, making us perceive the significance of the object of this study for these individuals. The gathering of such symbolic content involved the use of semi-structured interviews with eleven drop-outs and ten students who had repeated this modality of teaching in public schools in Natal, RN, during the 2006 school year. From the thematic and categorical analyses (BARDIN, 1977), we identified elements that gave support to some themes. Later, these themes led to three categories, suggesting that feelings associated with dropping out were based on the following: learning difficulties because they did not understand the contents; having their lack of knowledge exposed, thus bringing forth feelings of shame, humiliation, and embarrassment for not knowing how to read and write at a mature age; work, tiredness and sickness. The students who manage to remain in school are those who force themselves to live with the feelings of maladaptation and those who develop a sense of adaptation the other way round to the institution, that is, acceptance of institutional failures and omissions

Educação de jovens e adultos na cidade do Natal: uma reflexão sobre sucesso e insucesso

This essay proposes to research the success and failure in Education for Youth and Adults (known as EJA), based on the approval, failure and evasion rates in public schools belonging to the city of Natal, RN. Reflecting upon the reasons why some pupils from this program were dropping out of school while others kept on studying was a necessity. Therefore, we seek to know these subjects and their school environment. In the search this data, we set off by approaching the EJA politics, going through a historical path, highlighting significant facts to Brazilian and Natal history. While bringing together the pieces of information for this essay, we were lead to the State and City Education Department, in search of approval, failure and evasion rates from the year 2009. Based on these rates, two schools have been chosen: the first with a high failure rate and the second with a failure rate lower than the city average. The schools work was researched throughout the year 2010, through interviews with pupils, teachers, managers and employees; school files analysis; the analysis of files the establish the rules for EJA programs in the city of Natal. Nethertheless, this essay points to inner and outer factors which might come to contribute to the failure or success of pupils from the researched schools, emphasizing that the difference between those are in the team work present in the school with low failure rate