Conversation with Valdirene Alves de Oliveira, current General Coordinator of Secondary Education at the Ministry of Education

Abstract

By proposing the dossier “‘In a cemetery of dreams... Thanks to laws, plans’: policies, curricular practices for young people and proposals for high school in Brazil”, we intend to broaden the debate on the living conditions of young people in Brazil and how this topic has permeated the discussions of young people, researchers, businesspeople, policy makers, mass media and school communities. We know that the discussion is recent and only entered the agenda of government policies in the 1990s. In recent years, however, the need for more effective actions for this segment of the population has become clear, especially in the areas of education, health, work, housing, arts, culture and public safety. For this reason, we invited Professor Valdirene Alves de Oliveira to talk about the topic. We emphasize that our guest has academic and professional training in the area of ​​education. The professor has a degree in Pedagogy from Unievangélica; a Master's and Doctorate in Education from the Federal University of Goiás (UFG); and a Post-doctorate in Education from UFG. She has been a permanent member of the State University of Goiás (UEG) since 2012. She has worked as a permanent professor of the Master's in Education at UEG, at the University Unit of Inhumas (PPGE/|UEG) since 2020. She was coordinator of PPGE/UEG-Inhumas from June 2022 to May 2023. She is currently the General Coordinator of Secondary Education (COGEM) at the Secretariat of Basic Education (SEB) at the Ministry of Education (MEC) since May 2023. She has experience in the area of ​​Education, with an emphasis on educational policy, working mainly on the following topics: secondary education, educational policies and teacher training. During our conversation, topics such as rights, quality, youth, policies, and power were crossed by questions about inequalities and exclusions that overflowed into other entanglements about mobilizations, resistance, and occupations, and encouraged us to continue the fight, as Emicida (2014) calls for: “get up and walk, go, get up and walk, go, get up and walk, we are bigger, all we need to do is dream and move on.”