Uma ponte com a Defensoria: narrativas de defensoras e defensores públicos sobre os cursos de educação em direitos promovidos pela instituição

Abstract

The present Master’s Thesis has as its object the narratives of public defenders about the “defenders of the people training” courses, a type of legal education activity aimed at the lay public in Law that has been developed by several Public Defenders' Offices in Brazil. These courses are developed as activities in the field of education in rights, an institutional responsibility of the Public Defender's Office, and their target audience are community leaders and other people with the potential to disseminate the content discussed. They are focused on training for the exercise of citizenship, addressing legal topics from a practical perspective, aiming to qualify course participants for the understanding of rights and the institutions and mechanisms, especially within the justice system designed to uphold them. The research uses an empirical methodology with the main corpus being data collected directly from semi-structured interviews with public defenders responsible for six experiences of the courses studied. Its aim is to identify the conceptions and practices involved in the development of these educational experiences based on the narratives of the professionals who coordinate them, using popular education and critical theories of Law as a theoretical framework. The first chapter is dedicated to the synthesis of discussions that emerge from the field, with the presentation of the object and its context. In addition to characterizing the training of the defenders of the people, the history of the establishment of the Public Defender's Office and the main discussions about its role in society are presented. In the second chapter, we continue with the critical analysis of the conceptions about education that emerge, implicitly and explicitly, from the narratives studied, having as its central point the perception of dialogicity as the foundation of the educational practice. Finally, in the third chapter, there is a debate on the ideological orientations regarding Law that circulate in these spaces, concluding by the impossibility of separating Law and politics in the exercise of citizenship and by the potential to open fissures in the monopoly of legal knowledge through the educational activities that were studied.