Testimonies of Language Teachers

Utterances about the New Brazilian High School and its Pathways

Abstract

Law No. 13,415 (Brazil, 2017), by instituting the reform of Brazilian upper secondary education, reorganizes the school space and calls upon teachers to signify themselves under new conditions of production, marked by the logic of flexibilization. In this context, this article analyzes utterances of language teachers from public schools in Chapecó/SC, who were called to teach in the so-called Itinerários Formativos [formative tracks], taking them as testimonies inscribed in language from a place of displacement. The aim is to understand them not as individual accounts, but as sayings traversed by memory, ideology, and the confrontation with what is instituted as truth about public schooling. The research is grounded in French Discourse Analysis, as formulated by Orlandi (1999 [2020]), in articulation with the notions of subterranean memory (Pollak, 1989) and testimony as a gesture that does not close in meaning (Mariani, 2016). The corpus consists of three discursive sequences drawn from interviews conducted in 2022, in which the functioning of language is marked by hesitation, repetition, and metaphor. These elements produce meaning effects that point to a real resistant to symbolization and reinscribe ways of being and inhabiting the teaching profession in public schools. In this sense, the teacher-subject appears as traversed by a memory that escapes official policy and reinscribes the experience of teaching as an ethical-political gesture. Testimony, in this functioning, does not organize memory as remembrance, but as an insistence that destabilizes consensus and opens space for other possibilities of listening to the public school.