Resumen

TORRES, Leonor Lima. School as a Cultural Tradepost: The Cultural and the Symbolic in the Democratic Development of School. Rev. Port. de Educação [online]. 2008, vol.21, n.1, pp.59-81. ISSN 0871-9187.

Exposed to a wide range of external regulating factors of varying degree and nature, the public school has never been faced with so many cultural, social, political, and ideological diversities as it is today. These diversities not only challenge the school to adopt logics of change and reconfiguration, but also create a state of permanent tension with regard to the need to safeguard it’s historically grounded identity matrix. And it is precisely within this dilemma created between factors which are external in nature and invade schools on a daily basis (central and peripheral administration, local communities, just to name a few) and factors which are internal in nature (sociabilities, socializing practices, rituals, customs, traditions) that lie new possibilities to rethink the democratic development of schools. In this article, we take up the idea of school as a cultural tradepost (Torres, 2004) - a place where cultures cross, of daily metamorphoses of power and of conflict, of differentiated relations between school and educational actors (players) - , with the purpose of making clearer the relevance of the cultural and symbolic dimensions of the school organization in the development of processes of innovation and change and in the exploration of (possible) educative assessorial bonds. Our reflections will not, therefore, turn away from the critical questioning of the temporalities and the logics of action in the proclaimed new school arena, examining the role that the consequential cultural and political inputs play in the creation of autonomy and the democratic school.

Palabras clave : School culture; School organizational culture; Democratic autonomy of the school.

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