ABS097 - PISA (Programme for the International Student Assessment) in Brazil: the production and transformation of the future

This abstract concerns the production of subjects in education for the 21st century. It argues that the external assessment, PISA (Programme for the International Assessment), is establishing a “new” regime of truth regarding subjects in education that will be understood as discursive practices of tension between success and failure. The corpus consists on the discourses of PISA on the website of the Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais Anísio Teixeira (INEP) in Brazil. The methodological framework is the Discourse Analysis and Vygotsky’s theory considered through the perspective of expanding the theoretical background of critical pedagogy which is presented as social transformation, especial in the Brazilian context (Manolis, 2015, p. 25). The findings of the analysis point to the production of a future generation conceived as global citizens. In relation to Brazil, what PISA does is only give international visibility to the problems we already know, it does not give a solution. Otherwise, it can mask them. I finish by urging that every nation (not economy), every school, every teacher should ask and try to answer or, at least, pursue, throughout their lives, the question of what kind of school, of nation, of society he/she wants in an ethical way. I agree with Rogoff's (2003, p. 12) understanding of human development from a sociocultural perspective: in different ways and recognizing the value of the knowledge of specific cultural communities. Internal or external assessments are, as everything in education, a matter of ethics, a matter of social transformation, in Vygotsky's thinking.