SEEDUC/RJ School Libraries in Nova Iguaçu: Is Continuing Professional Training and Decolonial Strategies possible?
Keywords: Continuing education; Decoloniality; School library.
School libraries consist of a cultural piece of equipment inside an educational institution; for many students, it is the only formal space of access to culture, mainly literary. Despite the fact that in Brazil the right to education and culture is an inalienable constitutional right, a great contradiction is perceived: literary cultural knowledge, although extremely important, is not a central curricular concern of the school's daily life. This research aims to analyze the performance of the School Libraries of the State Secretariat for Education (SLSSE) in the city of Nova Iguaçu/Rio De Janeiro, in terms of its conceptualizations of citizenship that guide the Agents of Reading’s educational practices. From a discursive perspective, it intends to examine the practices of the professionals responsible for the use of the space and for attending to the school community: students, professionals, and families. When it comes to educational practices of the state institutions of Nova Iguaçu, old models of library use still prevail; and the initial and continuing education of the professionals assigned for the role of encouraging reading - chiefly in the city of Nova Iguaçu - do not rely on a racial multicultural approach or foundation, even though its target audience is made up of mostly black and brown students, as shown by MEC (Ministry of Education) and SLSSE. The research is ongoing and the methodological structure can be described as a dialectical approach, whose procedure selected as the most adequate to reach all the proposed objectives is the case study. To begin with, we carried out a brief history of the school libraries in Brazil. After that, we registered the current situation of the public policies regarding this cultural school equipment in the state education network of Nova Igaçu. In the third chapter, we dealt with the concepts of decoloniality, discourse, and practices that enable the effective confrontation of the racist structure that is reflected in the school's daily life. Last but not least, we briefly demonstrated the methodological path of the research.