As atividades circenses na educação física escolar: crítica às concepções hegemônicas expressas na produção do conhecimento

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the production of scientific knowledge concerning the teaching of circus activities in School Physical Education. The study is justified by the growing interest of Physical Education teachers in incorporating this content into the school context and by the expansion of academic production in the field, which calls for a critical analysis of the theoretical and philosophical assumptions that guide such production. Grounded in Historical-Dialectical Materialism, Historical-Critical Pedagogy, Historical-Cultural Psychology, and the Critical-Overcoming Approach to Physical Education, the research is based on the hypothesis that the teaching of circus activities in School Physical Education is hegemonically oriented by pedagogical conceptions aligned with the “learning to learn” motto, which subordinate elaborated knowledge to immediate experience and to the adaptation of subjects to the demands of the capitalist mode of production. This is a qualitative study of a bibliographic and documentary nature, developed through a systematic literature review. The research corpus consists of theses, dissertations, and scientific articles retrieved from the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, the CAPES Journals Portal, and publications from research groups in the field. The analysis, guided by categories such as conception of the human being, historical project, school, pedagogical theory, Physical Education approach, and treatment of knowledge, revealed that although the analyzed production represents an advance in challenging the fitness paradigm, questioning the centrality of sport as exclusive content, and recognizing circus activities as artistic knowledge within body culture, pedagogical conceptions that empty teaching of its role as a conscious and systematic mediation, fragment content, and limit the formative potential of this knowledge within the school context still prevail. Counter-hegemonic productions were also identified, pointing to possibilities for a pedagogical approach committed to the transmission of historically elaborated knowledge and to the development of theoretical thinking, although these remain minority perspectives within the analyzed corpus. It is concluded that the theoretical and methodological deepening of the teaching of circus activities in School Physical Education requires the strengthening of critical frameworks committed to comprehensive human formation and to the social function of the school in the socialization of systematized knowledge.