The ones who dare to teach: Teachers’ resistance networks and public discourse against a “School Without Party”

Abstract

In this paper, we propose to investigate resistance strategies developed by teachers in the face of the transnational rise of different forms of social and political conservatism in the last decade, with strong repercussions on the policy of education and school life in Brazil. The alleged need to fight "indoctrination in schools" and the "gender ideology" fiction serve as tools for creating moral, thus justifying censorship of certain themes in the Brazilian public arena. Such “conservative” movement aims at preventing the supposed stimulus to the sexualization of children. It also assumes that sexual and gender diversity would be a destructive agent for families and, therefore, schools must protect themselves from its threat. Here we analyze the speeches found in the material made publicly available by "Professores contra o Escola Sem Partido" (“Teachers Against the No-Party School”, PCESP) movement. Such movement was created by teachers in 2015 in response to mobilizations in the federal legislature to debate the “Escola Sem Partido” (“No-Party School”) project, which aimed to curb actions of "ideological nature". Within a wide spectrum of themes addressed by PCESP, in a context of intense confrontation of moralities in relation to gender and sexuality, we are interested in reflecting on the approaches and disputes about the place of these themes in schools. The mobilization of teachers leads us to reflect on the role of activism as one of the spheres of the act of educating.