Special Education in Physical Education: what teachers think about students with disabilities

This study investigates the schooling of students with disabilities in the common school. It aims to understand the meanings that Physical Education teachers attribute to their students with disabilities. The research is based theoretically and methodologically on the historical-cultural perspective of human development, especially on the elaborations of Lev Semionovitch Vigotski on the social constitution of human development and its propositions on the conditions of development possibilities of students with disabilities. It is anchored in the historical-dialectical method and in biographical studies by bringing narrative as a symbolic instance of language. The data were constructed in a municipal public school in a small city in the northwest region of the interior of the state of São Paulo, during the 2022 school year, recorded through narrative interviews with four teachers. The results show that the meanings that teachers attribute to students with disabilities are contradictory. Moreover, the findings point to the need for an educational change, which includes a real and effective teaching for students with disabilities, a policy model, a school, a pedagogical practice that promotes for these students opportunities not only to be in the social environment, but to act in it, as protagonists, as subjects capable of learning and developing.

Keywords:
special education; Physical education; narratives