School Complaints and the Educational Self: Openings for the Medicalization of School Difficulties

The aim was to understand the production conditions for medicalised subjectivity, by identifying the nexus between the school complaint and the educational self, through teacher narratives. What we report here concerns our initial immersion in this field of study and is the result of observations, impressions and an analysis of the interviews and focus group conducted with teachers from a publicly-funded school. Working hypotheses and the outline of a perspective that takes into account the historicity, socio-cultural context and socio-interactive dynamic emerged from this process. Eight teachers from a Primary School located in an inland municipality in the State of Bahia (Brazil) participated in the study. Teacher narratives were recorded and then transcribed. Their content was submitted to successive readings, during which we conducted a dialogue between the empirical and the theoretical in order to identify meanings and specific themes. During this process, we created certain indicator categories for the nexus between culture, school complaint and educational self. From this, we consider it possible to locate the necessary openings for the emergence of the pathologisation—of non-learning and of behaviour considered deviant—and of the subsequent medicalisation of the educational self. In sum, when seeking to identify connections between the school complaint and the educational self, we find important openings in the teachers’ narratives for the emergence of the medicalisation of difficulties arising from the schooling process.