ABS360 - Social School Architectonic: a social, historical and cultural study about power and control relations in spaces, artefacts and discourses

This presentation, situated in the field of Applied Linguistics, seeks to address the role of language in different school settings. Through the study of three distinct schools of the Brazilian public education, this paper pursues to discuss how the relations of power and control in social positions and discursive mediation artefacts constitute a specific school space and thus influence the conscience formation of its participants. We also intend to reflect upon how a distinct school physical space contributes to different possibilities of social positions and discursive artefacts. Therefore, based on a socio-historical-cultural research, exploring the concept of mediation [oposredovanie] (Vygotsky, 1978, 1981, 1987, 2009 [1934]) we seek to understand how the human cultural development is being performed and how participants of this culture are mutually shaped. From the reflections of Bakhtin (2010 [1924]) and Bernstein (2003 [1990], 1996, 1999, 2000) other aspects are analysed. The first author bolsters this discussion with studies on the architectonic form, aesthetic and genre, in which we attempt to understand the verbal-visual mass of a school setting, and thus understand their interdependencies, its dialogical and axiological positions of its participants in a specific architectonic form that governs the construction of a verbal-visual mass communication. The second contributes with studies on the relations of power and control within an institution that tend to control the forms of communication or open spaces for different forms to be materialised.