O museu como ambiente educativo: um estudo em Campina Grande-PB.

Abstract

The elementary school teacher is a key player in transforming pedagogical ideas into concrete actions, and he/she is responsible for guiding the activity to his/her students, even outside the school environment, as in the museum- education experience. Museum employees, interns and managers deal with a wider audience and directly with cultural heritage. These educators are fundamental in the construction of alternative teaching practices. The main objective of this research was to analyze the place of museums as educational environments, from the perspectives of Elementary School teachers (6th to 9th grade) of the Municipal Education Network, of directors, employees and Museum interns in the city of Campina Grande - PB. For the production of data, observations were made in 5 selected museums in that city based on an analysis grid, questionnaires and a Free Word Association were applied to 74 subjects, 26 from the Museum Group (GM) and 48 from the Teaching Group (GD). There were also 10 in-depth interviews with a sub-sample, 5 for each group. The data were collated according to the nature of the data, by content analysis, descriptive statistics, frequency of evocations and similarity analysis. We found substantial differences amongstmuseological institutions regarding the organizational and physical structure. The GM represents it from the cognitions Culture and Knowledge as key aspects, which unfold in an understanding of the relationship between Museum-education based on cultural preservation and learning through culture. This representation is based on the work activity of these participants, whose work location is a set of museums that focus more on local culture. The GD represents the museum as an equipment linked to history, associating the custody of memory, discipline of knowledge, art and knowledge, having its foundation in the legitimacy of a certain hegemonic and symbolic vision of this object. On the other hand, the teachers' view of the museum-education relationship is based on a perspective of dynamic, constructive knowledge, with meanings in the field of empirical and interactive knowledge. However, many issues hinder this approximation of the museum-school relationship. The distance between teachers and the object directly influences educational practices and poses itself as an obstacle for them in the professional sphere. The main justifications are the lack of training; lack of technical and pedagogical support from museological institutions and the municipal government; lack of time. These data indicate the importance of debating and including this topic in our daily lives.