Culturas em sala de aula: alunos estrangeiros e brasileiros convivendo em uma escola pública

Abstract

This research addresses the concepts of culture elaborated by foreign and non-foreign students, according to their beliefs and experiences, who share the same teaching space in a school in the city of Juiz de Fora. In order to understand the role of culture in the relationship between students, it is worth reflecting on what they think about their culture and the culture of others; how they recognize themselves as belonging to a culture and how they recognize the culture of the other. Here we intend to show that the point of view from which the student sees the language and culture of the other can be relevant to determine the relationships established with foreign colleagues. This work is part of the tradition of qualitative research of an interpretative nature (Mason, 1996) and aims to investigate the concepts of culture and multiculturalism by students in a school community. To this end, students from a specific public school located in the city of Juiz de Fora answered some questions in an interview that was recorded. The data obtained in these interviews were analyzed to observe regularities in the responses. The results lead us to realize that the majority of students mobilized, most of the time, different notions of cultures in each of the questions. Which shows us that when they looked at their culture, they mobilized notions of culture that were different from the notions of culture mobilized when they looked at the other's culture. This data reinforces the idea that the relationship between these students interferes with the mobilization of the notion of culture.