A questão agrária e a educação agrícola: estudo de caso no Campus Vitória de Santo Antão do Instituto Federal de Pernambuco

Abstract

Rural social movements and other agrarian issues appear as recurring themes in the political debate, but this vast subject is barely skimmed in the educational practice of the technical agricultural courses of the national professional training colleges, the Federal Network of Professional and Technological Education. At the campus of the Pernambuco Federal Institute in Vitória de Santo Antão, the situation is no different. Our aim is to analyse how rural social issues are approached in the syllabuses of the Institute’s technical agricultural courses and to study in what way this approach helps build and value the students’ rural identity. Throughout our research, we attempted to address the following questions: how has the Vitória de Santo Antão campus been contributing to construct a positive image of the rural worker? In what way have the students been encouraged to value their agrarian environment? What have those colleges been doing to encourage graduates to apply their newly acquired skills in the development of rural areas, rather than seek work in urban centres? We sought theoretical support from various scholars who have published on the subject. For a better understanding of the history of the struggle over land in Brazil, we drew on research by Manuel Correia de Andrade, Salete Caldart, Elide Rugai and Sérgio Celani Leite. The research comprised a semistructured questionnaire to be filled in by the tutors and interviews conducted with the students of our sample college, taking as a theoretical basis Duarte’s (2002) observation that “it is up to the researcher to define the study’s objectives and to choose its methodology”. We then proceeded to apply our theoretical framework to the analysis of collected data, seeking to systematise our findings by establishing links between theory and practice. The campus’s politico-pedagogical project was also examined. In this way we aimed to investigate how the course syllabuses have been approaching, or could approach, the agrarian question. Our analysis of the collected data suggests that the approach of courses to issues related to the agrarian question and social movements does not meet the students’ needs. We have come to the conclusion that the technical agricultural schools of the Federal Network of Professional and Technological Education need to undertake a commitment to ensure that both teachers and students engage politically, historically and conceptually with the rural worker’s problems and needs. By structuring the syllabus around the interests of the rural labouring class, learning institutions will help students to build an identity with a positive link to the rural environment of which they are potentially an integral part.