Educação política na escola: o caminho do monitoramento participativo mediado pela tecnologia cívica digital

Abstract

The deep democratic crisis that Brazil has been going through reinforces how savage it is the dispute for the meaning of democracy and a new approach on social grammar considering redemocratization process (1988); it also points out the need to expand efforts to delve into the democratic regime and improve it. It is agreed that citizenship education, as seen in the Federal Constitution of 1988 (art. 205), is a path to the formation of critical, participatory and political subjects of rights; and that the school is a powerful locus for exercising citizenship and political participation. In this sense, this research focuses on projects that seek contribution to citizenship in the school context, through participatory monitoring, mediated by digital civic technology, involving students and teachers participation on social control actions. Developed at federal, state and municipal levels, these projects have been identified as techno-civic innovations from the public management point of view and have been implemented by horizontal accountability organs in several schools. The “Controladoria na Escola” Project, carried out by the General Comptroller of the Federal District, between 2016 and 2018, is one of those experiences and reached more than 100 units, using a “School Civic Audit” methodology, mediated by the “Monitorando a cidade” Platform, civic technology developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). We aim to understand how the School Civic Audit (ACE), mediated by digital civic technology, configures as a Political Education initiative, as well as to understand in which ways it contributes to citizenship education and social participation processes. We chose a qualitative case study methodological approach. The constitution of the database was based on bibliographical review, combined with mixed methods, which combined research in documentary sources, semi-structured interviews and online focus groups. The Discursive Textual Analysis (DTA) helped us interpret the data produced through our methodological approach and we used the free software IraMuTeQ to organize that data. We developed the thesis that the ACE methodology configures as a seminal experience of Political Education, based on gamified participatory monitoring. As a result, we identified that the methodology promotes practices that have the common goal of strengthening citizenship through educational and participatory processes, supported by the awareness-content-action pillars, stimulating among students, feelings of greater belonging to the school and trust in democratic institutions. We observed that ACE generates civic engagement with a high degree of resolution, based on three stages: participatory monitoring at school; the production of data from the monitoring results; and the collective construction of solutions for the problems detected with the implementation of intervention actions. The research showed that civic technology, despite being recognized as a mobilizing and strategic element, had its role reduced to a data collection instrument. We found that the methodology was applied using a top-down model, in which the role of planning, implementation and data analysis is centered on the CGDF. At last, we emphasize that the protagonism of the control organ (CGDF) in the project confers legitimacy and reliability to the proposal, but also centralization in its execution.