School culture and class council: aspects of the democratic management of the pedagogical work?

The present article aims to discuss the pedagogical work culture in the scope of the class council. Several studies have shown that often the class council acts in a bureaucratic way and against a project able to align the educational practices of theschool with the social interests. Therefore, we seek to question what are the ritualized forms, meanings and beliefs implied in the pedagogical work of the class council and whether or not they are related to the permanence of the diffi culties encountered. This work is part of larger research in which, by means of a qualitative approach along with an interpretive methodology, from the perspective of the cultural studies, we have investigated two public schools in the city of Ponta Grossa, State of Paraná, in order to reveal and understand their school culture and, consequently, unveil the methods of evaluation employed and how the pedagogical work was managed. To perform our analysis, we rely on the contributions of Vi ao Frago (1998), Dalben (1992, 2004), Mattos (2005) and Oliveira (2002, 2004, 2009). We were able to perceive that in the surveyed schools there is a shared sense of classifi catory evaluation, of the school council as a bureaucratic step to be fulfi lled, and not as a process inherent to the pedagogical work.