Empirical research on moral practices in Brazilian schools: the state of knowledge

Abstract

It is a biographical research type of State of Knowledge, which pursues to identify the national scientific articles in journals published from 2002 to 2012, describing empirical researches in Psychology and Education on school moral’s practices and analyze, in the light of the constructive theory, if such practices are favorable to the development of moral autonomy of students. The databases searched were Scielo and BVS. According to the descriptors, firstly it was found 341 articles of which, by Reading the summaries, 68 remained. Of these, using the criteria of selecting only those referred to an empirical research that could contain the explicit or implicit idea of school practices favorable to autonomy, lasting for the final analysis, 17 items. The finalists were divided into 3 categories for bringing different perspectives about the object of study: “ moral education, values ??and learning: concepts and relation with the teacher praxis”, “training intervention” and “intervention in school.” Only seven articles reported school practices regarded as favorable to the construction of autonomy according to the constructivist perspective mainly focusing on working with self-knowledge , knowledge of others and active participation in the organization of the learning process . However, the benefits offered by some of the practices analyzed are short because they are specific activities, are intended only for students, rarely involve the school as a whole and have little influence in sociomoral school environment. Appears that despite numerous schools work with moral practices and there is a lot of research carried out both in the field of psychology and education identified in theses and dissertations, there are few studies that are published in indexed journals and yet few address active methods are continuous, involving the school community and also include the training of school personnel.