Um dispositivo sem autor: cadernos e fichários na escola primária

Abstract

In the French school system, the term “dispositif” (roughly “apparatus”) is used by policymakers and reformers to designate organized and explicit sets of long-term and purposeful educational interventions. The notebooks and looseleaf organizers used in the primary grades, by contrast, are an apparatus without “author”, one which exerts a strong but largely unnoticed influence on the manner in which students and teachers conceive the knowledge and skills acquired in school – their content, their hierarchy, their value. One effect of the use of this apparratus by teachers is to invest primary education with some of the characteristics of secondary education. An examination of this process enables us to revisit Foucault’s characterization of the scholary apparatus, according to which the effectives of an apparatus resides in its capacity to inscribe particular knowledges within “natural” – and as a result invisible – relations of power.