Resumo
This study was made from the vigotskian socio-cultural perspective. Its aim was to analyse the social interaction between pairs in the Physical Education lessons whose intention was to value and incentivate the interaction. The students involved are supposed to have mental deficiency. With this aim one opted for a qualitative research, having been used the participating observation and the interview to collect data. The latter, assumed several shapes and involved several social “actors” from the school context, who were in touch with the students who participated in the Physical Education lessons and the student himself/herself. The documental analysis, the sociometric test, the evaluation of the psychomotor parameters and the students’ drawings had also been used. These data were put together taking four themes into consideration: the student, the class, the school and the Physical Education lessons, which are related with different levels of analysis of the social interaction, even when one investigated the inter-personal level of the Physical Education lessons. The data collected specifically evidenced that in the education sector of the cooperative entity, which was investigated, prevailed an individualistic “culture”, with features remarkably authoritarian. Besides these showed that the teaching was conducted individually, in spite of the many students who showed some retardation in the social and collaborative abilities. As for these, one realised that their participation in other contexts and social groups, with other values, attitudes, and schemes of events that could be used as a counterpoint to those hegemonical in the school context was very limited. This way and although the relation the subject establishes with the context is dialectic and in spite of not acting in a determinant way over the former, the interaction between students in the Physical Education lessons bore many of those values and schemes of events of the school context. This is so much the truth that the interaction between them was distinguished by the verticality and not by the transference of control and responsibility.
