Teaching techniques and cultural resistance: Contribution to Sociology teaching practices

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present the results of research conducted at a school in a peripheral neighborhood of the municipality of Marília (São Paulo state, Brazil). The research started from the assumption that the cultural process must be observed from a micro-and a macro-sociological outlook on the basis of Paul Willis’ analyses. The latter stresses that cultural processes may be absorbed and reformulated in a dialectical fashion, remodeling and creating a process of cultural resistance based on the choices made by the very working class in question, which the author termed a school counterculture. Based on this reference, we observe the need to know the school reality to approximate scientific knowledge and students’ cultural horizons through a didactic transposition. Hence, starting off from a pedagogical sequence with the premise of getting to know students’ reality, it was possible to adapt sociological knowledge to these students’ realities by teaching techniques and producing teaching materials. This enabled acquiring a greater amount of content from the subject of Sociology by the students, thus constituting new forms of teaching-learning and building more solid training for teachers in the field of Sociology.