Desmistificando o bom doutor : imaginários sociais sobre deficiência e seus reflexos nas políticas educacionais inclusivas

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to produce knowledge to contribute with the field of inclusive education policies. Such an objective is achieved by studying social imaginaries on disabilities and special education through the perspective of inclusive education. This study has the following research question: how the social imaginaries on disabilities reflect on special education through the perspective of inclusive education policy? Thus, these imaginaries — especially the ones explicitly or implicitly found in the legal devices and teaching discourses — were analyzed in order to identify their reflections on the history of inclusive education policies. This work is the result of a basic, qualitative and exploratory research in which desk research and an on-line questionnaire were used as data collection tools. The empiric corpus of the documental research are the legislations which deal with education policy — especially inclusive education — and the rights of people with disabilities. The questionnaire was answered by basic schooling teachers who work in public schools. It contained questions about the TV show The good doctor, whose protagonist is a doctor in training diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders and savant syndrome. Using this instrument, we tried to get closer to inclusive education and to students who are the target of special education. This approach was understood as a strategy to reveal the teachers’ social imaginaries on disabilities and its influence in their educational practices. The results of this research show that there still are challenges to be faced in order to strengthen the inclusive education policies and also that these challenges permeate socially constructed imaginaries on disabilities. Those encompass, among other factors: the notion of capacitism; the prejudice as an attitudinal barrier to the inclusion of people with disabilities; the existence of an ambiguous notion of these subjects’ autonomy; and the negative perception of disabilities as difficulty, limitation and/or restriction.