Students’ Voices About How Schooling Affects Their Lives

This chapter problematizes the schooling experience and its role as a structuring factor on young students’ lives. The debate derives from research developed in Portugal with 34 elementary students from 8 school groups. Recognizing that society has been under constant social transformation that affects identity, sociocultural and economic conditions, we understand it is worth observing how school life has also been affected. To meet our goals, we adopted the biographical interview as a means of collecting data, considering its potential to deal with the subjectivity of the phenomenon under research. Following a narrative methodological approach, we took a comprehensive look at possible new institutional mandates and the nature of educational relationships. This text provides a focus on the relationship of young students with knowledge, the representations they make of teachers and their conceptions about this profession, and we assess their understanding of how school affects their lives.