Prova Brasil: instrumento (re)orientador da prática de leitura em uma escola da rede estadual de ensino de Araguaína-TO

Abstract

The current paper presents an approach of institutional evaluations as a (re)guiding tool in changes of teaching reading practice. The survey was accomplished in the year 2013, in a public school in the city of Araguaína, Tocantins. The research objectives were to: (i) determine whether the Prova Brasil has been configured as a (re)guiding tool of the reading practices of Portuguese Language teachers of that school; (ii) identify the public policies implemented by the federal government and of the state of Tocantins to improve the teaching quality by the results outside evaluations, the SAEB and the Prova Brasil; (iii) identify and describe the reading practices of this school before 2011 and current; (iv) determine whether there were changes in the results of the reading students skills; and (v) know the repercussions caused by the Prova Brasil practices in the teaching of reading teachers of Portuguese elementary school teaching unit. This refers to a study case with a qualitative approach on the influence of institutional evaluations, specifically, the Prova Brasil, in the teaching of reading. Therefore, as data acquisition tools and procedures used were: document inquiry and analysis such as class roles, lesson plans, school activities reports, the school political pedagogical project and the federal and state official documents; Portuguese classes observation taught by two teachers and the culmination of projects accomplished by school staff; field diary production on observed lessons and informal conversations; reading and analyzing of the students notebooks; conducting semi-structured interviews with Portuguese teachers, educational coordinator, former director and school director, servant responsible for the school library, two former education secretaries of the state of Tocantins, Executive Secretary of SEDUC; and student questionnaires. The class observation was held in the second half of 2013 in 05 9th grade classes. The cut is justified by the fact that those students were Prova Brasil participants, applied in that same year. The focus of the investigation was to verifying whether the institutional evaluation policies have been mobilizing school staff to carry out the accountability of educational services offered in addition to checking out whether teaching reading has been based on Prova Brasil‟s descriptors and guidelines of the Portuguese language PCNs. The survey results revealed that Prova Brasil applied by the federal government, and the System of Assessment, Monitoring and Improvement of Education in Tocantins/SALTO applied by the state government, are reorienting the teaching reading of Portuguese teachers from the analyzed school; well as changing the school practice, as it was noticed from the analysis of the corpus, the administrative and teaching staff of the school is developing a work aimed to answer the call of these evaluations aiming to better results expressed by the indices measured by those tests. During this study new problems related to the topic were identified. Due to no purpose in discussing them here, these are open topics for future research.