Projetos de trabalhadores: os significados dos cursos profissionalizantes

Abstract

This work discusses the dialogues between professional schooling and the meanings attributed to knowledge, social life, and work by secondary education technical workers. The focus is on experiences lived by targeted students in a vocational training institution with a strong tradition of making demands on its pupils. It shows how the ethos cultivated by this school enters into dialogue with and interferes with the world visions and projects of those subjects, regarding their relation to knowledge and the social groups they originate from; and how it sometimes favors their metamorphosis into cultural mediators and sometimes into drop outs, depending on the meaning they build for the relations between their original culture and those they are beginning to have access to. This work concludes by pointing to the little-explored potentialities of pedagogical projects for professional education based on the perspectives of the workers receiving that education.