A avaliação como dispositivo de subjetivação

Abstract

This master‘s thesis is anchored on the research line for History and Philosophy of Education at the Master‘s Program at the University of Caxias do Sul and it discusses the processes of school assessment under a genealogical perspective. The research problem questions the ways through which school assessment has been functioning as a device in the production of modes of subjectivation. As theoretical references, the concepts for devices and subjectivation developed by Michel Foucault are the main support. The investigation is confined to documents that legislate on processes of education and, more specifically, that rule the process for school assessment. The first document used in the analysis is dated January 1828; from it the statements regarding the process of assessment up to the latest LDB (Lei n. 9.394/96) and the stated opinions and decrees resulting from it. The documents were obtained – in its majority – at a document collection called Base Legis. In the documents, conditions for the possibilities of a discourse on assessment in each discourse formation are investigated. It is pointed out that the analyses do not operate based on judgements regarding assessment processes, but on the historical conditions of its functioning. Hence, the assumption that assessment turns out to be a certain device woven in different relationships of power and knowledge, in the production of certain ways of subjectivation. The analysis starts from the notion of historical discontinuity. There is an attempt to highlight the dislocations in discourses that produce ruptures in the functioning, here limited to the production – via assessment – of ―good Christians‖ and ―good citizens‖, from a model of exclusion and one of inclusion, as well as the production of disciplinary logic in assessment going through the subjects of school. The analysis is not forged in such a way as to characterize a global history, not even a linear history, but from the notion of discontinuity of history. What has been attempted was to produce a problematization about the constitution of that subject of the education by the assessment process, and that was only possible with the rupture of the notion of an identity subject, which is unitary and autonomous. There is an interest on the constitution of the ways of being, in their relationships with power and knowledge. Thus, assessment is understood as a device that encompasses and sets up the subjects as a network that is woven in the architecture of schools and out of it; going through behaviors agreed upon, the dynamic of circulation; it is present in the valuation of moral values, in scientific utterances, in legislations, in timeline organizations; in short, in the entanglement of what one is, of what one says, and what one does. That way, it is possible to state that the device is inscribed in a line of power, connected to configurations of power that can put into effect certain ways of subjectivation, which in this process produce citizens, the included, disciplined and standardized ones who cover the entire social body.