Life Project in the New High School: what do the students say?
RPGE - Revista online de Política e Gestão Educacional, Araraquara, v. 28, n. 00, e023030, 2024. e-ISSN: 1519-9029
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22633/rpge.v28i00.19885 10
These young people also recognize the school's efforts to promote new ways of
learning, with more dynamic and differentiated classes, new teachers, and good relationships
with them. From their accounts, they realize that the school has opened new doors and
opportunities for their future careers. However, they point to challenges, especially due to the
length of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has further highlighted inequalities
of race, class, territory, and gender, aggravating rates of depression and anxiety.
Young people understand the importance of school for their education as students and
as active and engaged human beings in society, in their relationships with others, and in the
world of work. We believe that there is a proposal that seeks to improve the quality of
education and the lives of these students, but we emphasize the need to understand the
perspective of each one in the New High School. It is essential to provide listening spaces so
that these young people can reflect on who they are, where they come from, and what they
want for the present and the near future.
According to Bakhtin (2011[1979], p. 308), when we conceive of the subject as a
social, historical, ideological, and linguistic being, we understand that the verbal interaction
he establishes with the other is mediated by the text (spoken, written, signaled), since "Every
text has a subject, an author (the speaker or the writer)". The text is always enunciated in a
dialogical way with the other, and is therefore a joint construction. Bakhtin (2011[1979], p.
348, our translation) states that "Life is dialogical by nature [...]", as the students point out
when they (re)get to know themselves as young people in New High School, reflecting this
experience within social relationships with their peers and teachers. This process is an
experience of a "[...] conscious dialogical nature", in which "To live means to participate in
dialog: to question, to listen, to respond, to agree, etc. In this dialog, man participates fully
and with all his life: with his eyes, lips, hands, soul, spirit, whole body, actions"(Bakhtin,
2011[1979], p. 348, our translation).
In this sense, it is important to listen to these young people at school and at home,
because "Young people value guidance from adults who care about them and have more
experience" (Damon, 2009, p. 140). Fathers, mothers, teachers who can contribute and
participate in the Life Project of these subjects by understanding them in their singularity, as
unique in a given chronotope (time and space). In this way, my, your, our "[...] non-alibiin
existence [...] is at the basis of the concrete and singular duty of the act, it is not something
that I learn and am aware of, but it is something that I recognize and affirm in a singular and
unique way" (Bakhtin, 2017[1986], p. 96, emphasis added).