Salas de Recursos Multifuncionais no Brasil: para que e para quem?

Abstract

Since the decade of 2000s, the Specialized Educational Assistance (AEE) in Multifunctional Resource Rooms (SRMFs) have been the flagship of the special education policy in Brazil. In order to do so, there was a significant increase in the number of SRMFs throughout the country, reaching the mark of 41.751 resource rooms at the end of 2014. This expansion was justified as necessary to strengthen the process of educational inclusion in the regular classes of regular education and to guarantee education of quality to people with disabilities, global developmental disorders and high skilled students ( special gifted persons). Considering this the general aim of our study was to analyze the functions of the rooms with multifunctional resources in the context of Brazilian special education. In order to develop our study, we selected the following specific objectives: a) to contextualize the functions of educational assistance for people with disabilities in Brazilian special education; b) to show the relationship between the functions of multifunctional resource rooms and the functions of education for people with disabilities from the perspective of international organizations; c) describe the functions of the SRMFs expressed in national documents, explaining their mechanisms of materialization; d) to discuss the latent functions of the multifunctional resource rooms. Our theoretical support comes from authors who study the history of special education in the country as well as those who discuss the policy of special education from the perspective of inclusive education. In addition to this, we found support in master's and doctoral studies produced from 2005 until 2017 which investigated the theme of multifunctional resources and specialized educational service. The methodological contribution used in our study and analysis of the empirical material was guided by the theoretical-methodological conception of dialectical historical materialism and guided by the documental analysis procedure used by Garcia (2007). We also used, as a source of data, guiding and normative documents produced by the former Secretariat of Special Education (SEESP), by the current Secretariat of Continuing Education, Literacy, Inclusion and Diversity (SECADI), by the National Education Development Fund (FNDE) among other sources. In addition, statistical data and documents produced by International Organizations dealing with the functions of education for people with disabilities were used from the last quarter of the 20th century to the present day. The results of the research allowed us to confirm the initial thesis that the materialization of multifunctional resource rooms has not allowed this space to fulfill its original functions, since the adopted organizational model does not make it possible to overcome chronic problems of special education in the country, such the non- learning conditions of students, the weak and precarious preparation of regular classroom teachers, the use of resources by non-public entities, among other factors. However, if classrooms did not improve enrollment levels for special education subjects, they allowed the market to enter educational space in the name of a pretended inclusion of students with disabilities, global knowledge disorders, and high skilled students. In this sense, there are two angles of interpretation: one: the specialized educational service does not correspond to the needs of students and teachers who work in the multifunctional resource rooms; two: the these rooms support the reproduction of capital, especially in its material aspect of commodity circulations.