O Problema da Linguagem no Ensino de Geografia

Abstract

This dissertation is within the great area about language and thought, in the scope of the school learning, and focuses on the conception of language by the area of Geography teaching in Brazil. Language is not only access to knowledge, it is knowledge itself. The process of thought depends on language, just as language depends on thought; they are, therefore, interdependent. By word, thought and language unite, attributing substance to the actual substance for the process of knowing. However, language, being a concept approached by different areas of knowledge, is commonly understood not as a structure of thought, but as the transmission of information; Communication; expression; structuring rule of a process; or semiotic object. Geography teaching underwent some changes, moving away from mnemonic and encyclopedic teaching for regionalist and critical teaching, and its methodologiesaccompanied this transition, influenced by the new pedagogies. Some culture products are taken by the area of Geography teaching as didactic resources (like photographs, cartoons, and music) and called different languages. Our aim was to verify which language conception has the area of Geography teaching when alluding to this term. Motivated by Michel Foucault‘s concept of Founder Discourse and Commentary, we chose as an empirical object the set of articles produced by the research and graduate programs in the field of Geography in Brazil, available in electronic form. Inspired by the guiding method of Carlo Guinzburg, we carried out the analysis of the articles to apprehend their conception of language and, later, we analyzed the terms to investigate the application of its use. We found out an inflation of terms related to language (basic literacy, reading, literacy and languages), which shows a serious weakness of the area regarding conceptual use. Many terms are used in the metaphorical sense in a naive way and with approximation to the area of linguistics without considering their different natures. The proliferation of terms and their lack of reasoning reveal not only a mistaken conception of language but also a conception of school with a strong approach to the pedagogies of competences, the ideal of multivalent student and the instructor teacher. It is the epistemological conception that one has about education, student, teacher and knowledge that determines the didactic methods. When presenting various instruments and didactic resources as language, Geography reproduces a conceptual problem, not just a matter of terminology.