O documentário como instrumento de educação crítica

Abstract

 This theoretical and bibliographic essay proposes a reflection on the use of documentary film as a pedagogical tool for critical education in secondary school, with emphasis on the listening methodology developed by Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho. The corpus brings together six films that mark distinct moments of the director’s career, Cabra Marcado para Morrer (1984), Santo Forte (1999), Edifício Master (2002), Peões (2004), Jogo de Cena (2007) and Últimas Conversas (2015), examined with attention to how the method repeats itself and changes in each work. It is argued that the principles of this practice, among them active listening, dialogism, openness to the unexpected and the refusal of single truths, offer relevant foundations for an emancipatory and collaborative audiovisual pedagogy. The text articulates these principles with the mafuá pedagogy proposed by César Migliorin, with Bakhtin’s dialogism and with Paulo Freire’s liberating education, and extends the discussion to the field of Geographic Education, in which concepts such as place, landscape and territory gain density in students’ audiovisual production. The contribution of the essay lies less in inaugurating the connection between Coutinho and education and more in bringing together, within a single framework, listening, mafuá, dialogism, critical education and geographic knowledge, suggesting paths for school practices committed to critical citizenship, especially in the face of phenomena such as the precarization of labor and spatial inequalities.