‘Of Bellies and Books' refers to pregnancy and formal education, constructed as mutually exclusive processes. This thesis explores that opposition by tracing the confluence of discourses through which it is produced. In so doing, it dissolves dichotomies and proposes a shift to the subject as both constituted by and constituting of discourses. Both academic research and global and national social policy construct teenage pregnancy as problematic. This is heightened in development contexts, where in-school pregnancy triggers Malthusian fears of overpopulation and consequential poverty increase. Conversely, formal education and training are represented as a means to personal development and success, through acquiring knowledge and skills leading to formal employment and individual empowerment. In this sense, schooling is constructed as a symbol of - or entrance to - modernity, while pregnancy and parenthood are defined in terms of the opportunities they prevent. From this perspective, in-school pregnancy works against individual and social progress and is synonymous with backwardness and tradition within a modernising and globalised world. Exploring in-school pregnancy in this thesis becomes a means through which to revoke the binary symbolised by tradition and modernity which produces a deficit view of the pregnant schoolgirl. Within this context, the study has been driven by the following research questions: · How do education policy and practice frame in-school pregnancy in Mozambique? · How do families interpret and regulate in-school pregnancy? · How do young people – young women – navigate the available discourses in the performance of their identities? Stimulated by a desire to explore the national policy tackling in-school pregnancy indicating that pregnant schoolgirls should be transferred to night courses, the empirical data collection took place within 10 months in and around the capital Maputo. It entailed documentary analysis, interviews with 10 Ministry of Education officials, 20 school teachers and 33 young people (25 girls and 8 men/boys) in and out of education. Through the generation and analysis of data, I develop a nuanced interpretation of the discourses that construct and regulate in-school pregnancy within schools and families. Within the institutional space of schools, a textual analysis of the policy shows how language borrowed from the biomedical and legal fields is directed towards the production of in-school pregnancy as unwanted, unplanned and ultimately ‘wrong'. This normalises the difference between pregnant and non-pregnant schoolgirls, producing transfer to night courses as a rational strategy to tackle in-school pregnancy. Although understood as a means to bridge the gender gap in education by tackling one of the main causes of female dropout, the current policy acts de facto as a highway to dropout, thereby reproducing gender exclusion. Within families, pregnancy initiates the complex procedure of family formation by drawing on the mutually exclusive categories of childhood and adulthood and symbolising the transition between the two. I contend that these two spaces, schools and families, often associated by research participants with modernity and tradition respectively, are not stable and homogenous constructs, but offer shifting and contingent sets of norms which are both conflicting and intersecting. By engaging with young people's narratives, I argue that pregnant schoolgirls, while being constructed by discursive norms, also resist and react to them. At school, young pregnant females enact a number of strategies to resist transfer to night courses. At home, they resist family formation and find ways to combine their multiple identities. By drawing on this, I ultimately contend that young pregnant schoolgirls navigate different regulatory frameworks in the production of their identities. This means that the itineraries they construct in crossing boundaries within normative frameworks constitute their identities and reposition them as travellers.

In 2004, Mozambique introduced a new competency-based curriculum framed around the principles of culturally responsive pedagogy. Teachers need to strategically use local languages, traditions and culture to build on what children bring from home and share with their families to bridge the gap between schools and communities. This study is a qualitative ethnography of the teaching and learning process in one suburban primary school in Mozambique. The aims of the study were to explore teachers' ideas, values, and understanding about the teaching and learning process, and to reflect on how these views, which are manifested in their classroom practices, influenced the implementation of curriculum changes at the classroom level. The study conceptualised the new educational policy in Mozambique as a discourse that has introduced in the field of teachers' practices new pedagogic possibilities and frame of references. Informal conversations, interviews, and observations of lessons and school dynamics were the main methods used for the process of data collection. Teachers, students, parents and community members participated in the study. Ethnography as methodology offered the possibility to gain multi-layered insights into those contextual, social, and cultural realities around which teachers create meanings for their roles and actions, attribute significance to them, and build relations with students, parents, and community members. Understanding how these realities were represented and reproduced in teachers' discourse and practice was regarded as a precondition to interrogating teachers' interpretations of changes. The study combined a Bourdieusian sociological analysis of the teaching and learning process with a postcolonial critique. Whereas Bourdieu's tools of field, habitus and capital supported an understanding of the ‘whys' behind what is going on at classroom level and the cultural and ideological assumptions underpinning teachers' practices, a postcolonial critique exposed the rules of classification and exclusion underpinning the ‘hows' of teachers' pedagogies. The findings of the study showed that the pedagogic discourse of the new curriculum does not resonate with teachers' understanding of their roles, practices and professional identities. The conception of ‘schooling as an extractive process' and the construction of Portuguese as the most important symbolic cultural capital legitimised the process of alienation between schooling and home socialisation and sustained the power relations, determining the separation between inschool and out-of-school languages and knowledges. If, on the one side, teachers dismissed their responsibility to transform and integrate local knowledges into the official curriculum by constructing themselves as implementers of an educational policy that they did not fully grasp, then on the other side, in the process of making sense of the new curriculum, the socio-cultural values that teachers attached to it were challenging their field positions and maintenance. Teachers maintained their distinction through their ‘Portugueseness'. The ‘Portuguese-only discourse' was the most dominant ‘doxa', taken-forgranted by teachers in their practices, despite the fact that Portuguese as Language of Learning and Teaching was perceived as one of the main challenges for student learning. The implication of the study relates to the cultural micro-politics of teachers' identities. To attend to the introduction of curriculum changes as a technical matter fails to address the power-relations embedded in the teaching and learning process. The new pedagogic possibilities fostered by the curriculum are not succeeding. Without the re-narrativisation of how teachers think about them in order to build new field positions and meanings that resonate with changes, the reform seems unlikely to succeed.

Este trabalho trata de descobrir os sentidos da formação literária na periferia (América hispânica e África portuguesa) por meio da análise de formas narrativas breves (contos) e de seus correspondentes processos sociais. Dividido em quatro partes, o presente estudo se inicia com uma abordagem comparativa dos conceitos de forma e formação segundo as teorias de Antonio Candido e Ángel Rama, da qual se depreenderá uma análise das condições em que se concretizou certo realismo vanguardista entre as décadas de 1930 e 1960. A segunda e a terceira partes investigam, por meio da análise das obras literárias de Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier e Gabriel García Márquez, em América hispânica, bem como de José Luandino Vieira e Luis Bernardo Honwana, em África portuguesa, a relação entre forma narrativa e processo social com vistas à elucidação do sentido da formação segundo essas mesmas obras. Por fim, a quarta e última parte é composta por um breve ensaio sobre algumas das principais tendências da cultura brasileira contemporânea, marcada pelo horizonte da pós-formação, e em diálogo com as criações artísticas e os conceitos teóricos mobilizados ao longo das três partes anteriores. / This work tries to discover the meanings of literary formation in the periphery (Hispanic America and Portuguese Africa) through the analysis of brief narrative forms (short stories) and their corresponding social processes. Divided into four parts, the present study begins with a comparative approach of the concepts of form and formation according to the theories of Antonio Candido and Ángel Rama, from which stems an analysis of the conditions in which a certain avant-garde realism materialized between the 1930s and the 1960s. The second and third parts investigate, through the analysis of the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier and Gabriel García Márquez, in Hispanic America, as well as of José Luandino Vieira and Luis Bernardo Honwana, in Portuguese Africa, the relationship between narrative form and social process in order to elucidate the meaning of formation according to these same narratives. Finally, the fourth and last part is composed by a brief essay on some of the main tendencies of contemporary Brazilian culture, marked by a post-formation horizon, and in dialogue with the artistic creations and the theoretical concepts mobilized throughout the previous three parts.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Sociology Department, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

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