Atuação da(o) psicóloga(o) escolar em equipe de especialistas: um estudo na rede municipal de ensino de João Pessoa-PB

Abstract

The current thesis broaches the performance of the school psychologist in a multiprofessional team and defends that the school psychologist can collaborate with actions promoting the development and learning of the various actors that make up the school community and, specifically, with the team they work with. Its objective is to understand and analyze the performance of school psychologists in specialized teams from the municipal public health network in João Pessoa - PB. The thesis defended is that the performance of school psychologists in specialized teams has specificities that must be comprehended by the team and school community to facilitate a performance focused on institutional demands and learning and development processes. Took part in the research 92 professionals from the Educational area, 62 being psychologists, 8 social workers and 22 pedagogues. The psychologists working in Fundamental I and II levels, as well as the EJA level, answered a sociodemographic and professional profile questionnaire online (Google Forms). Of those, 14 psychologists, besides the 22 pedagogues and 8 social workers, also answered a semi-structured interview, and of those, 3 psychologists answered a reflexive interview as well. Results showed that most professionals did not have a supervised internship in the school psychology area, impacting their performance in the educational context, given the relation between professional training profile and team performance. Data from the interviews also show that the actions and choices taken by psychologists in the municipal public health network alternate between the critic and hegemonic perspectives, which is recognized as an advance in the consolidation of a new way to perform. It is, however, necessary to direct the role of the school psychologist towards a practice that is coherent with literature in the Educational School Psychology field, backing actions in the context of education and performance of a specialist team member. The account from the psychologists verifies that specialists still expect psychologists to act in a traditional manner, based in a clinical perspective, with a focus on the student, student services, learning disabilities diagnosis and forwarding to other specialists when they refer to actions in the teaching and learning process. They nonetheless stressed the pertinence of the evaluations in school and forwarding students when other intervention possibilities for overcoming learning disabilities are exhausted, and that interfering in the before-mentioned process requires considering multiple factors and actors. Results also show that, among the psychologists, participating in the specialist team had not been considered their practice’s object of intervention, in the sense of collaborating in its development, which was considered an important aspect and target of a more in-depth reflection for the professionals. Social workers and pedagogues, on the other hand, pointed out difficulties, criticisms, complaints, goals and potentialities in their team work analysis, characterizing the performance in this format, showing the existence of questions that might be the focus of a scholar psychologist’s actions, to contribute with the development of the specialist team. This group also mentioned that, in their conception, the performance of the psychologist in school requires acting alongside professors, students and families, acting as a team member, and in the process of teaching and learning, by means of advising and listening to intervene in matters of behavior, interpersonal relations and learning disabilities. The referred data endorses the need for the school psychologist to perform a practice that seeks to promote reflexions on the many questions involving the specialist team, intending to collaborate with the strengthening and development of the team. But, before even that, we defend it is possible and is indeed a part of these professionals’ actions to execute the mentioned interventions, both from the technical documents on what constitutes the performance of a psychologist as well as the theoretical and methodological foundations of Educational and School Psychology. It is expected that the results of this research and the reflections that may be extracted from within it will contribute with new study propositions that explore the potentialities and peculiarities of the work of a psychologist in multiprofessional teams and their various possibilities of intervention within the school community. Above all else, it shows the urgency of the debate and effective actions on defining what exactly is the function of a school psychologist in the educational process, along with the challenges presented by Law 13.935/2019, regulating the presence of social workers and psychologists in public education institutions.