Representações Virtuais da Instituição Escolar: um estudo de caso no Orkut

Resumo (EN)

School Virtual Representations: An Orkut Case Study is a research which has the purpose to understand and analyse the school virtual representations through the Orkut relationship site communities. Assuming that students and teachers organize themselves in interaction, the research firstly studies how the students represent themselves in the communities and which descriptions they elaborate from the school. ln a second step the project looks carefully at the representations the teachers make from themselves and from the institution, confronting them with the students', trying to find some connection between them.
From the referential of the late modernity analysis, the research aims to: discuss how the new model of interaction and social organization contributes to the construction of the students' and teachers' representations; check the representations the students have of themselves and their representations of the educational institution; identify the representations that teachers have of themselves, of their students and of the
r school; understand the degree of interaction between the students' and teaches' representations in view of the institution.
The research is qualitative, referenced in netnography, because it is a method that enables the study of different cultures, among them we have the cyberculture. The work started with a bibliographical search, supervised by the counselor so that we could refer to theoretically. lt was our choice together with the counselor’s support the idea of having thinkers who corroborate for the communication and education area, such as Nicholas Sevcenko for the acquaintance of the changes that occurred in the twenty-first century; Zygmunt Bauman with the late modernity and the community concepts; Norval Baitello and Flusser for the image-building, communication and misinformation concepts; Stuart Hall, Anthony Guiddens for the construction of identity; Erving Goffman with the representations concept.
We started the research through an anonymous personal page on the site Orkut. Our intention to remain anonymous is due to the fact that we are active subjects in the search field, avoiding what, according to Travancas (2006), could be an "observant participation".
At first, we selected 72 communities whose titles and descriptions addressed topics related to students and schools. At the same time reading the posts we developed the theoretical referential appropriation, which allowed us a new selection of communities which are centered in opposition to feelings of love and hatred for school. As we understand that teachers and students organize themselves in interaction, we retook some forums from the "Occupation Teacher" Community, in order to analyze the representations they elaborated from the institution. From the data collection, we developed the understanding that the communities answer the students desires as a space for idealized characterizations the same happening with the teachers, which explains the rise of fragmented and unreal identities in the school, explaining the different representations of students and teachers.