ABS298 - The complexity of school-community relations as a dialogical mesocultural context for students’ development

This research aims at identifying and analyzing the cultural and personal meanings, concerning school-community relations, presented by a male adolescent living in a poor area of a satellite city, close to Brasilia, Brazil. We used an ethnographic approach followed by interviews with a group of teenage students attending to a 6th-grade class in a public school, from which we selected Victor (fictitious name), a 15 years-old boy, to carry out an idiographic investigation. One particular interview with Victor took place immediately after he was expelled from the school, due to suspicions that he was directly involved with drug trafficking.  Results show that Victor lived his everyday life under the strong tension between the drug gangs’ and the school’s cultures. The school never approached nor discussed the existence of such opposite contexts. Even though situated in a community where crime gangs prevailed, school professionals simply ignored the problem and did not discuss the terrible conflict lived by students like Victor, and this resulted in continuous suffering and the escalation of school-community conflicts.