Religious teaching in public schools: an ethnographic research.

Abstract

This paper aims at discussing 1) the problematic of teaching religion in public schools through a research held in a real environment of a class of religious teaching and, 2) how the religious identity of the students is worked by the teacher in this particular setting (a class of religious teaching in a Brazilian public school). The research paradigm that conducts this investigation is of an interpretative approach of ethnographic character and the meaning is constructed through an investigation in a classroom. The class investigated here was audio registered and transcribed few hours later. This work is also guided by the Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1989, 1992) and by the reflections about discourse and about language as a social practice, proposed by linguists and other language thinkers as Mikhail Bakhtin ([1929] 1997), Sara Mills (1997) and others. The results point to the perception that, in the researched class, the multiplicity of religious practices present in society is not considered and, thus, the students have access only to a partial view of what religion is, which can be in conflict with other religious manifestations they can face out of school.