Special education knowledge in productions of the Santa Maria postgraduate education program

Saberes da educação especial em produções do programa de pós-graduação em educação de Santa Maria

Conocimientos de educación especial en producciones del programa de educación de posgrado Santa Maria

Kássya Christinna Oliveira Rodrigues¹ kassyaor@gmail.com

Federal University of Western Pará, Brasil

Ivanilde Apoluceno de Oliveira²

State University of Pará, Brasil

Esta obra está bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional.

This study presents the state of knowledge of the academic production on Special Education in the Graduate Education Program of the Federal University of Santa Maria, a reference agency in this field of knowledge in Brazil, for developing a long trajectory in the initial and continuing education of teachers in Special Education.

The research problem is: what is the Special Education knowledge based on Freirean and related authors' theoretical frameworks, developed in non-school environments, being systematized in theses available in the repository of the Graduate Education Program of the Federal University of Santa Maria - UFSM?

It aims to identify which Special Education knowledge is present in theses available in the repository of the Graduate Education Program of UFSM; to survey doctoral theses linked to the field of Special Education in the Education Program of UFSM; to analyze theses that refer to liberating education in out-of-school education practices; and to verify what Special Education knowledge these theses announce.

This text is organized in three sections, one with a brief contextualization of Special Education in Brazil, the methodological procedures that led to the present text, and the discussions based on the material collected in the field, the repository of the Graduate Program in Education at UFSM.

Jannuzzi (2012) and Mazzotta (2005) are authors who make efforts to systematize and translate the history of Special Education in Brazil. In these studies, the authors highlight the silencing of public policies in the care of people with disabilities, the difficulties faced by this area of knowledge, as well as the medical influence on the care of these human groups.

Jannuzzi (2012, p. 1) systematizes the history of special education in Brazil from the survey of federal official documents, materials from primary sources, others from secondary sources with the aim of identifying how "school education was organized, formal, intentional, in order to provide some instruction that would allow this student, with physical, physiological, intellectual limitations, but without mental illness, to live in a social organization like ours.

The author reports that the institutionalized education of children with disabilities in Brazil emerges between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, in a timid way, even though there is the promising Law of October 15, 1827 about the school of first letters, advanced in the legal intention, but far from an effective education practice with the human groups living in the Brazilian national territory at that time.

Special Education in Brazil is produced in order to ratify the care of people with disabilities separately from the people classified in the standards of normality. Thus, health institutions, such as the Santa Casa de Misericórdia, and others are referred to in the literature as the ones that provided the first care for people with disabilities. The specialized educational institutions, on the other hand, are the first to bring the references of systematized education of these human groups.

Mazzotta (2005) highlights "precisely on September 12, 1854" (p. 28) a milestone of special schooling to people with disabilities in Brazil through the foundation, by Pedro II, of the Imperial Institute of Blind Children today, named Institute Benjamin Constant in Rio de Janeiro. At the same time, in 1857, he founded the Imperial Institute of the Deaf-Mute, today renamed the National Institute of Education of the Deaf - INES.

Both institutions were born with the prospect of developing educational practices with the human groups of blind and deaf people, even with little representative service, when considering the total number of blind and deaf people and those, effectively, attended in the institutions as pointed Mazzotta "in 1872, with a population of 15,848 blind and 11,595 deaf, attended 35 blind and 17 deaf" (2005, p. 29). Even so, these institutions are significant for representing possibilities of discussions about the education of people with disabilities in Brazil.

The 1960s were marked by the Integration Policy, which sought to insert the handicapped person in the regular school context, so that he or she could move between special and regular classes, adapting to the physical, methodological, and educational structure of the school.

This situation contributed to their non-inclusion in the educational environment, because there was no concern in the pedagogical organization of the school to meet their needs, such as starting from the knowledge they brought in order to articulate it with the knowledge systematized by the school, establishing "anchor bridges" between consolidated knowledge and new knowledge intentionally provoked by the school.

Moreover, the relationships of socialization and affection of the person with disabilities with the other subjects in the school space were harmed through the segregation of special classes. In this context, it is also understood that the affirmation of their condition of being a human being, a historical subject, with capabilities, was shaken.

The principle of normalization, adopted by integration when referring to the student's conditions for access to school contributes to maintain the framework of school exclusion. According to Oliveira (2002, p. 77):

Integration is based on the principle of normalization in the sense of enabling (selective) access to regular education for people with special needs considered psychopedagogically educable. Integration depends on the personal conditions of individuals, who should adjust to school, and therefore presents, as a reference, the diagnosis and educational evaluation as an assumption of the process of social integration.

Mantoan (1998, p. 31), when referring to the integration process of the person with disabilities in regular school, resumes the metaphor of the "waterfall system", from the Nordic countries, in which all students should follow the same flow of water, symbolizing that the school "must favor the 'least restrictive environment possible', offering the student, in all stages of integration, the possibility to move through the 'system', from regular class to special education".

The Integration Policy, then, assumes a welfare, individual and therapeutic character in education, and the student with disabilities must adapt to the school environment, trying to achieve the standard of normality required by the school. Normality that is in accordance with the socially elaborated conception that maintains a historical imaginary of social exclusion which privileges the superimposition of one group over the other: normal versus abnormal, as pointed out by Oliveira (2002, p. 132):

The axis of reference to these people has been morally and historically Eurocentric, built around physical or mental impairment, in a polarized and excluding perspective: Being X Not Being (influence of classical philosophy), Belonging and Not Belonging to the "gender of gold" (Platonic image), Self and Other (modern rationalist discourse) and Normality and Abnormality (scientific discourse of eugenics) and evolutionary theory, among others, but which has in the "Being", the "Self" and the supposed normality of the "living organism", the founding idea of unity.

People with disabilities are required to adapt to social and educational practices in their coexistence with other people, even though there are a number of architectural barriers that represent for them a jungle full of traps, in which the "fittest" survive.

In this historical context, the school resists to deal with the differences. The integration policy created segregating environments to attend the so-called "handicapped" in special classes, thus denying the right to difference in regular classes, as pointed out by Fonseca (1995, p. 201):

Educating in ghettos or in isolated settings (aka "special classes") is, in one dimension, dis-educating, in that it is assumed that the disabled have no chance to learn. The break with the structure of regular school and special education institutions is necessary to attend to diversity and to break the stigmatization of people with special needs.

The insertion of people with disabilities in the regular school, in special classes, was marked by conflicts inside the school that show a picture of school exclusion, because in the integration policy, the educational actions were concerned with the limitation of the person with disabilities and their possible school adaptation from a clinical diagnosis.

Sassaki (1997, pp. 33-34) considers this policy important for being a stage for the consequent insertion of the person with disability, in the regular school context, but points out that it became "Insufficient to end the discrimination that existed against this population segment, but it was also very little to propitiate the true full participation with equal opportunities".

Integration was an action of responsibility of the person with disability, which allows us to read that the school characterized those who fit its pedagogical requirements as fit, not developing educational actions for the social and intellectual formation of these human groups.

The therapeutic interventions, based on the medical model of disability, were an attempt to improve these subjects and their consequent insertion in society. However, by trying to fit them into the school environment, through special classes, it contributed to the stigmatization of students with greater cognitive, psychological, and physical impairments in the educational process, favoring the maintenance of a welfare and segregating educational model.

This therapeutic-educational model of special education did not look at the person, but at his pathologies, prioritizing his rehabilitation.

Disabled people have the right to medical, psychological and functional treatment, including prosthetic and orthotic devices, physical rehabilitation, vocational rehabilitation, assistance, counseling, placement services and other services that will enable them to develop their capacities and abilities to the fullest extent possible and accelerate the process of their social integration or reintegration (Sassaki, 1997, p. 11).

Thus, the school in integration acted as a selective agency of people, with reference to a standard of "normality", turning the special classes in deposit and assimilating the incompetence of the school system as Fonseca (1995, p. 202) "make the 'special classes' a 'deposit of incompetents' or a 'circus of stupid' is clear proof of incompetence of the education system itself, which bases its selective and reproductive mechanisms on the myth of cultural uniformity. Therefore, from the problematizations about the integration policy, educational debates were held with the purpose of developing a new political-educational structure that would enable the inclusion of people with disabilities in the regular education system under a new perspective, that of valuing the "difference in abilities". Inclusion has become the new paradigm in Brazilian educational policy, considering human beings with potentialities to learn and the school as a plural space to work on the meaning of differences and the consequent appreciation of cultural identities.

The Federal Constitution of 1988 brings an understanding of education as a right for all, legislation ratified by the Education for All movement, consolidated with the Declaration of Jomtien, in 1990, and the Declaration of Salamanca, in 1994, of which Brazil is a signatory. These are important international documents which influence the legal field of Brazilian education for the inclusion of people with disabilities.

With the inclusion policy, special education becomes part of general education. Thus, the focus is shifted from the person with disability to the environment, thus, it starts to problematize the conditions of the environment for the inclusion process of human groups that make up special education, which are people with disabilities, high abilities/super qualities and global developmental disorders (Brazil, 2011).

Rodrigues, Guimarães and Correa (2021) discuss a brief set of policies that make up the inclusion policy as described below:

The National Education Framework Law 9394/96, the National Education Plan 2014-2024, the National Policy for Special Education with Inclusive Education perspective (2008), and the Brazilian Inclusion Law (2015) represent an expansion of the legal scope that enable guarantees of rights for people with special educational needs in the most varied aspects of their lives ranging from the guarantee of quality education to access to assistive technology and universal design for learning as prescribed in Decree No. 7.611 (2021, pp. 67-68).

In this way, the perspective of Inclusive Education questions the school, the architectural structure by which society is structured, the segregating social attitudes, the non-availability of assistive technologies for all people with disabilities, their non-access to all spaces because they are inaccessible, their insertion in the working world, among other issues.

The Inclusive Policy of Special Education points out the person in a condition of disability as a being of capacity, however there are a number of contradictions between the legal scope and the effective field of educational practices that are still segregating. On one hand, it carries the rancor of Special Education crossed by welfare actions developed with people with disabilities, on the other hand, common education develops its actions based on conservative pedagogical trends that see differences as a problem.

The school veiledly denies the presence of a person with disabilities in its territory by producing discourses that this person gets in the way, doesn't learn, can't do it, and that teachers are not prepared to deal with the human groups in Special Education, among other assertions.

The legal scope of inclusive education is based on international documents oriented to Human Rights that formulate their principles from an idealistic understanding of existence, based on the idea of equality, universal, but without questioning the existential concreteness experienced by different human groups of special education that are not assimilated by this discourse of equality forged in the European context. About this Candau (2008, p. 46) argues that:

It is possible to state that the entire matrix of modernity has emphasized the issue of equality. The equality of all human beings, regardless of racial origins, nationality, sexual choices, in short, equality is a key to understand the whole struggle of modernity for human rights.

Candau (2016) also problematizes that, due to the fact that, in contemporary times, the issue of difference is being highlighted, "new" discourses with conservative positions and maintenance of a current order are put on the scene as the multicultural assimilationist and differentialist discourses that bring, respectively, a dimension of "welcoming" differences from a rhetorical perspective only, of being together, without problematizing the context and structures and; the identity understanding, with the sense of essentializing subjectivities, which does not allow understanding the multiplicity of interests and crossings inherent to human groups marked by these differences.

In the midst of this brief trajectory, this "state of knowledge" study is being carried out in search of knowledge that is being systematized in the field of Special Education and how this production expands the understanding of the person living with disabilities beyond the territories of special schools and inclusive education, which cross all education levels and modalities in the national territory.

This is a qualitative bibliographical study in which the state of knowledge is based on a survey of theses on Special Education available in the repository of the Postgraduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Santa Maria.

For Ferreira (2002, p. 258) the research is collaborative in meaning that the bibliographic research carried out through the state of the art or knowledge:

They seem to have in common the challenge of mapping and discussing a certain academic production in different fields of knowledge, trying to answer which aspects and dimensions have been highlighted and privileged in different times and places, in what ways and under what conditions certain master's theses, doctoral dissertations, publications in periodicals and communications in congress and seminar proceedings have been produced.

This mapping is challenging also because it allows the researcher to build possible paths for the systematization and analysis of the data collected in the field in order to announce: what do they reveal? What theoretical and methodological marks are predominant? Which themes are timidly brought up? Which ones are silenced?

In this way, the researcher needs to educate his look to read, understand, and analyze the data that is available when conducting a bibliographical research from the state of knowledge or the state of the art. And challenge yourself to guide the data found in the field, bringing the experiences, resistances, and even the insurgencies materialized in studies that may be available in the formats of theses, dissertations, scientific articles, among others.

Romanowski and Ens (2006, p. 38-39), in a study on "state of the art" research in Education, highlight the importance of conducting this type of study in Brazil, since it makes it possible:

Pointing out paths that have been taken and aspects that are addressed to the detriment of others. These balances make it possible to contribute to the organization and analysis in the definition of a field, an area, as well as to indicate possible contributions of the research to social ruptures.

The authors also point out that this type of research allows us to understand what has been produced in a certain area of knowledge, which are the most used theoretical references that enhance the field of practices, the advances and complexities in certain areas of knowledge, as well as their limits.

Romanowski and Ens (2006) differentiate the state of the art from the state of knowledge. They announce that they have approximations for bringing to the scene systematizations of scientific research in which there is an entire survey of studies of what has been produced in a particular field, however the state of the art deals with a research that involves a greater complexity in the search for the material surveyed that needs to be available in more than one source to the detriment of the state of knowledge that presents a single place for the survey and systematization of data such as a congress, a scientific journal, the bibliographic production of a particular theme, among other possibilities.

Thesing and Costas (2017, p. 2) argue that the state of knowledge enables both the understanding of the productions circumscribed in a given field, and allows ratifying "the legitimacy and uniqueness of the research topic and the methodological choices defined in their investigations."

The survey and mapping of doctoral theses that could announce studies on "Special Education" and "Inclusion" from a "Freirean perspective" was developed by experimenting with descriptors that could bring up research carried out in Special Education with the theoretical imprint of Paulo Freire and/or related scholars, as well as other possible territories of the education of special education audiences beyond regular and specialized schools.

It was considered that the survey of theses would bring with it a potential to communicate other places of research accomplishments in the field of Special Education, since Paulo Freire was referenced as one of the descriptors. This author carries with him, in his theoretical elaboration, an understanding of education and teaching-learning processes that are organized beyond the school environment, the most recurrent place of study in the field of Special Education.

The repository of the Postgraduate Program in Education at UFSM was selected because it is a reference institution in the initial and continuing education of teachers in the field of Special Education.

The purpose of consulting the institutional repository was to search for doctoral theses on Special Education and Inclusion. The search terms allowed us to find scientific studies that referred only to the field of Special Education, and did not bring up studies that aggregated Paulo Freire's theory and Epistemologies of the South.

Sensitive inquietudes crossed this search that "initially" revealed a "(dis)encounter" with the theses that could aggregate in their systematizations studies from the field of Special Education based on Freirean reflections.

These concerns mobilized the search for descriptors that were more refined and could better direct the finding of the theses (Romanowski & Ans, 2006). Thus, the descriptors "Special Education" AND "Freirean education" AND "Inclusive Education" were used. Based on these search terms, it was noticed again that the aforementioned repository indicated the same theses when searching by the initial descriptors and that they were highlighted only by the descriptor "special education", except for the others. It was also identified that both the use of the initial and final descriptors evoked the same texts from the repository, modifying only their order in each search.

From the search for the descriptors mentioned above, it was found that the systematized studies in theses were presented from different temporalities, not allowing the study of a set of productions within a time interval. This situation allowed a new search forwarding to locate the theses with themes focused on Special and Inclusive Education, considering the annual production in the repository and searching for an initial interval of five years, 2020-2016, adding one more when it was observed that in 2020 there was only one thesis available in the repository, thus investigating the theses between the years 2020-2015.

It was possible to systematize the data by tabulating and categorizing them so that they could be read and analyzed, procedures that are better described in the following items.

The search conducted in the repository of theses of the Postgraduate Studies in Education program of UFSM was initially between the years 2020 and 2016, however, as it was observed that in 2020 there was only one thesis registered, the year 2015 was added to this study, accounting for the survey of the last five years plus one without updating the available data, possibly due to the pandemic and because of the suspension of face-to-face academic activities.

The total number of theses made available in the repository of this program in this period is 138, namely: one in 2020, twenty-three (23) in 2019, thirty-six (36) in 2018, forty (40) in 2017, nineteen (19) in 2016 and nineteen (19) in 2015. Of this total, only 27 refer to studies in the field of Special Education with the respective records per year: in 2020 zero (0), in 2019 seven (7), in 2018 nine (9), in 2017 four (4), in 2016 four (4) and in 2015 three (3), having an average of 4.5 theses per year.

We surveyed and printed the abstracts present in the theses linked to the field of Special Education with their respective themes, authors, supervisors, keywords, and catalog sheets, when possible, since it was noticed that not all PDFs of the theses were in accessible formats, making it more difficult to organize and print the material.

The analysis and production of the data involved in this "state of knowledge" was made possible using the abstracts available in the theses, but, in some circumstances, when they did not announce the data necessary for the understanding of the categorizations made, the texts of the theses were consulted in order to clear up any doubts.

Faced with the printed material, a first challenge was put into check: how to organize the studies? By themes of approach? By theoretical categories? By levels of education in which the studies were developed? What are the most recurrent themes? How have these been approached? Questions that emerged and that are also problematized by Romanowski and Ens (2006, p. 38) as described below:

What methodological approaches were employed? What are the contributions and pertinence of these publications to the field? What is in fact specific to a particular area of education, teacher training, the curriculum, continuing education, educational policies?

An initial way of organizing and analyzing the data available in the theses was with the survey of the "possible places where they were carried out". I chose, a priori, some territories where studies in the field of Special Education could be carried out: "college", "Basic Education", "High School", "Elementary School II", "Initial Grades", "Children's Education", and "Other Spaces" were previously selected. However, as I moved through the data, I identified two other places: "Professional and Technological Education" and the "School for the Deaf", which were immediately added to the study.

Nine of the twenty-seven theses were developed in college and all of them were developed in the southern region of Brazil, with only one of them surveying data from two college Institutions in the south of the country as well as from two other IEs, one located in the northeast and the other in the north.

Eight theses were developed in Basic Education, not referring to a specific stage or modality of this level of education. Five of them oriented their reflections on the initial grades of Elementary School, and one of them also had a connection with Children's Education. This was followed by two developed in Elementary School II, one in Technological and Professional Education, another in the School for the Deaf, and only one outside the school territory, carried out with Health professionals who work in Primary Care and in Hospital environments.

From this initial survey, a first fissure in the study can be noticed: that there is not in this repository, in the interval 2015-2020, a commitment to research in the territory of Early Childhood Education and only one developed outside the school environment with a thesis carried out with professionals in primary care and hospital environments, a significantly necessary text as it provokes the continuing education of health professionals in their context of performance (basic health units and hospitals), locus of transit of all people, including those living with disabilities.

Law 9.394/96 establishes the mandatory enrollment of four and five-year-old children in Early Childhood Education, but the law is still fragile because the family has to enroll the children and the State has no enforcement mechanisms to ensure the presence of these children in school.

Regarding the inclusion of children with disabilities in this stage of Basic Education, the situation may become even more difficult due to several situations: (a) by virtue of many families living the mourning of the expected child; (b) the material and psychological conditions of the families in leading the child to the Early Childhood Education space; (c) the structure of the Early Childhood Education spaces that may not welcome children in condition of disability; (d) the various therapies to which this child is submitted, not considering primordial its schooling process, among others, Kirk Gallargher (1991), Barroco (2012), Leonardo and Silva (2012), Silva and Silva (2021), Guimarães and Correa (2020).

The themes of the theses in evidence in this study were grouped by categorizations elaborated by me, but guided by their proposals for realization. In this way, nine categories were identified, as shown in the table below:

1 - Education and health (2 theses)

2 - Categorizations of special education (11 theses)

3 - Inclusion (8 theses)

4 - Evaluation (1 thesis)

5 - Teacher Education (5 theses)

6 - Curriculum/Public Policies (3 theses)

7 - Teaching-Learning (2 theses)

8 - Professional Education (1 thesis)

9 - Teaching work (1 thesis)

In many instances, some theses fell into more than one category, for example "Inclusion" and "Categorizations of special education".

It was noticed in this study that the categories "Education and health", "Evaluation", "Professional education", "Teaching work", and "teaching-learning" processes were the ones that presented the least expressiveness with study themes, accounting for between one and two theses, as explained below:

Table 1
Theses and categorizations by knowledge areas.

The few studies on the categories listed above may mean a need for greater investment in research, studies, and in-depth studies in order to collaborate with the field of Special Education.

In this study, we noticed some fissures present in the field of education that, historically, was forged from practices developed separately from common education. The marks of Special Education as a segregated action are still strong and present in the context of common education.

Studies point out that students with disabilities conditions are still seen as from special education, specialized educational care teachers or itinerant. They are seen as those who need to develop in the multipurpose resource room from the specialized educational care Oliveira (2004), Denari, Sigolo (2016), Silva and Silva (2020).

Denari and Sigolo (2016) discuss the training process for Special Education teachers. They discuss the need for this to take place in higher education, that it be a solid, well-founded training and that it brings in the specific part of the training the goal of collaborative action between the Special Education teacher and the regular classroom teacher with the person with disabilities.

The issue raised by the authors ends up ratifying that the process of teacher education in the field of Special Education needs to be linked to common education and not separate from it, as it had been historically developed both in the field of education and in the field of educational practices. Likewise, the training process for regular classroom teachers needs to bring in its matrix the training to deal with differences, including people who are part of the public of Special Education.

In the table below, the categories "teacher training" and "curriculum/ public policies" are highlighted with a greater expression of studies, with the first theme representing five theses and the second three, but we still see a fertile field of problematizations. There is much to verify, analyze, reflect, problematize, intervene, systematize, and register in the field of Special Education.

Each of the five theses under the "teacher training" category points to a specific place and even so they do not account for the education developed in the school territory, they raise perspectives on teacher training linked to music, literacy, assistive technology, collaborative practice, and inclusion in a general dimension.

As for the theses arranged from the category "Curriculum/public policies", only three were identified, one on inclusion in higher education, the other two highlight the field of policies and curriculum in the categorizations of high abilities and deafblindness. We realize that these theses potentiate other problematizations in the field of Special Education.

Table 2
Theses and categorizations by knowledge areas.

The following table allows a final grouping of the theses based on the categories "Categorizations of Special Education" and "Inclusion". Of the twenty-seven theses with themes focused on Special Education available in the repository of the postgraduate Program in Education at UFSM, eleven brought concerns and studies to the area of Special Education, considering the categories in which the human groups of this area are involved, namely, people with disabilities, with high abilities/superdotation and those with global developmental disorders (Brazil, 2011).

Similarly, it was noticed that the category "Inclusion" also aggregated a representative number of studies. It is important to emphasize, once again, that some theses were grouped into more than one category.

Regarding the theses involved in the categorizations of Special Education, four bring to light discussions involving autism, three high abilities/super ability, two refer to deafness, one to intellectual disability, and one to dyslexia - a specific learning disorder that is not part of the field of Special Education, but that demands specialized care. It can be seen that these theses deal with their objects in different aspects. Some of them discuss the teacher training process and the partnership with the family, others bring the dimension of the educational practices, others still highlight the identification of people with disabilities, among other situations necessary to the studies in the field of Special Education.

As for the theses gathered in the inclusion category, eight theses stood out, which, on one hand, raised the theme from more general studies, with specific theoretical perspectives, represented by six theses, and, on the other, brought particular aspects of inclusion materialized in a case study and a biographical narrative of Arthur's story, as described in the following table.

Table 3
Organization of Theses by Special Education categories and problematizations about inclusion.

It was also verified that the theme of autism was more often mentioned in the theses, followed by studies on high abilities, intellectual disability, deafness, and dyslexia, to the detriment of other categories that were not even mentioned, such as visual, hearing, physical, multiple sensorial disabilities, and deafblindness.

The abstracts of the twenty-seven theses surveyed in this research indicate that twenty-six referred to developing a qualitative study, only one brought a quanti-qualitative approach. Twenty theses linked their studies to field research.

As for the theoretical framework adopted, we noticed a greater expression of Foucault in seven theses, followed by five studies that involved tests or some approach from psychology, plus five studies based on Vygotsky's cultural-historical theory, according to data available in tables 4, 5, and 6:

Table 4
Approach, study method and theoretical references.

In the table above, one can see some gaps in the method section, since the abstract does not indicate the type of study included in the research. On the other hand, in the table below we noticed a gap regarding the theoretical support in one of the theses.

Table 5
Approach, study method and theoretical references.

In the following table, the theses that link their reflections to the cultural-historical theory are aggregated, and one of them also refers to Paulo Freire's writings.

Thus, in the universe of 27 theses with themes focused on the field of Special Education, only one explicitly pointed, in the abstract, to the Freirean referential as one of its anchors to read and collaborate with the thesis' writings.

In general, the theses are oriented by texts of European and American theorists, with little mention of Latin American, African, or Asian thinkers.

Table 6
Approach, study method and theoretical references.

In the table below, it was identified that three theses did not indicate in their abstracts the theoretical contributions used to support their arguments.

Table 7
Approach, study method and theoretical references.

The other theses raise different theoretical contexts such as Saviani's critical-historical theory, dialectics (with no author's explanation), a study on meta-evaluation, among others.

Table 8
Approach, study method and theoretical references.

We experienced difficulties in gathering some data from the abstracts. In many of them there is not the minimum information to compose it, such as: a brief introduction about the theme, the problem question, the objectives of the study, a brief highlight of the methodological procedures and its conclusion with some results. Romanowski and Ans (2006, p. 46) state that:

The variation in the presentation format of the dissertation abstracts was a factor that made the analysis difficult, as some abstracts are very succinct and others are confusing or incomplete, without information about the type of research and data collection procedures and several confused research methodology with research procedures and instruments.

The above affirmative allows us to understand that the realization of a research that proposes to carry out both the state of the art and the state of knowledge is crossed by these and other limitations, however, a study of this nature allows us to know and analyze the production of a certain field of knowledge, a situation that can be collaborative for the development of new research and the expansion of this field.

Throughout this research we noticed advances in studies in the field of Special Education that began to be questioned in the context of general education, crossing the two levels of Brazilian education, basic and college. However, based on a survey of theses over a five-year period, we found that some stages of basic education were not even contemplated with studies such as early childhood education and only one study developed in a non-schooling environment. It can be seen that there is an open sea of research to be developed on inclusion in different areas of college, such as health sciences, technological sciences, exact sciences, and other areas of the humanities, such as undergraduate degrees in addition to pedagogy, anthropology, law, economics, and administration, among many others not yet covered by research in the field of special education.

The themes of inclusion, teacher training, the concern to seek partnerships with families for the development of inclusive processes were present in the discussions of the theses. There were studies that sought to broaden the horizons of research in certain theories, a necessary condition for the understanding of multiple possibilities of inclusive processes. We also identified studies that reflect on specific fields of special education categorizations, having in the categories of autism and high abilities singular representativities, perhaps for the reason that autism is recently included in the special education public and people with high abilities are meant as those who need differentiated teaching-learning strategies to have their capabilities systematically provoked by the school.

Studies that aggregate Freire's writings and those of related authors developed in environments beyond the school were not present in this state of the art, a situation that sensitively corroborates the need for research that allows the visibility of resistant and insurgent Latin American, African, and Asian theoreticians in the discussions of the field of special education.

Theorists who collaborate with writing in the field of Special Education from theoretical lenses that break with the scientific epistemology of the modern state that is segregating, racist, enabling, sexist, homophobic. Theorists who in their exercise of reflection on life, human beings, and the planet allow "oppressed social groups to represent the world as their own and on their own terms, for only in this way will they be able to transform it according to their own aspirations" (SANTOS, 2019, p. 17).

How to cite: Rodrigues, K. C. O., & Oliveira, I. A. (2022). Special education knowledge in productions of the Santa Maria postgraduate education program. Revista Tempos e Espaços em Educação, 15(34), e17440. http://dx.doi.org/10.20952/revtee.v15i34.17440

Authors' Contributions: Rodrigues, K. C. O.: conception and design, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data, drafting the article, critical review of important intellectual content; Oliveira, I. A.: conception and design, acquisition of data, analysis and interpretation of data, drafting the article, critical review of important intellectual content. All authors have read and approved the final version of the manuscript.