1 Introduction

We call “hospital class” the legal device¹ which provides for the continuity of school life for seriously ill children and adolescents, in which the right to maintain ties with the school of origin in the hospital environment is ensured. In the specialized literature, the most frequent descriptors are “hospital education”, “hospital school”, “schooling in a hospital environment”, and “mobile school”, in addition to “hospital classes”. In this article, due to the locus of this research, we will use the concept of mobile school² from the Pediatric Oncology Institute (IOP) - Support Group for Adolescents and Children with Cancer (Graacc) / Universidade Federal de São Paulo (Unifesp).

The objective of this study is to subsidize elements for a debate about teacher training from teacher-student experience in the context of the hospital class. This article discusses the interpretative possibility concerning the period of treatment of teens with cancer and their teachers from the anthropological perspective of non-places and Augé's (2004, p.43) anthropology of mobility. What differs from this perspective of classical anthropology is precisely the place occupied, on the one hand, by the ethnologist and, on the other, by the anthropologist. According to ^{Augé (2004}, p. 43), the conventional place for the ethnologist and “[...] for those of whom they speak is a place, precisely: the place occupied by the indigenous people who live in it, work in it, defend it, mark its strengths in it, guard its borders [...]” - that is, a place understood in its entirety, historically delimited, cohesive, we could say, in a certain sense, hermetic. This is the place that the anthropologist finds to decipher, due to its different characteristics, its specific form, especially about the cultivation of nature, the fractionation, and delimitation of cultivated lands, the organization of houses, as well as their residence codes, etc. (^{AUGÉ, 2004}). In search of the definition of the term “anthropological place”, the author writes:

We reserve the term 'anthropological place' for that concrete and symbolic construction of space that could not account, by itself alone, for the vicissitudes and contradictions of social life, but to which all those to whom it designates a place, however simple and modest. It is because all anthropology is an anthropology of the anthropology of others, moreover, the place, the anthropological place, is simultaneously a principle of meaning for those who inhabit it and a principle of intelligibility for those who observe it. (^{AUGÉ, 2004}, p. 51).

The understanding of “place” is essential for the proposition that the author suggests to us about his opposite notion, that is, that of “non-place”. If the place refers to this more or less cohesive configuration in which ^{Augé (2004)} places us, that of non-place is configured precisely by the characterization that it is opposed to. Briefly, according to ^{Augé (2004)}, a place can be defined by its identity, relational and historical character; a place that cannot be defined through these categories will constitute what he calls a “non-place”. The leap from “place” to “non-place” must take into account the sense of modernity of contemporary societies or, more specifically, of super modernity. The hypothesis that ^{Augé (2004}, p. 73) defends is that:

[...] super modernity produces non-places, that is, spaces that are not anthropological places in themselves and that, contrary to Baudelairean modernity, do not integrate the old places: these repertories, classified and promoted to 'places of memory', occupy a limited and specific place.

It is worth paying attention to this beautiful description of the author regarding the hypothesis:

A world where you are born in a clinic and you die in a hospital, where, in luxurious or inhuman forms, transit points and temporary occupations (hotel chains and invaded lands, holiday clubs, refugee camps, slums for the unemployed or for the perpetuity that rots) multiply, where a tight network of means of transport is developed, which are also inhabited spaces, where the frequenter of supermarkets, vending machines, and credit cards is renewed with the commerce gestures on 'the low-down', a world thus promised to solitary individuality, to the passage, to the provisional and the ephemeral, proposes to the anthropologist, as to others, a new object whose unprecedented dimensions must be calculated before asking what gaze it is subject to. (^{AUGÉ, 2004}, p. 73-74).

^{Augé (2004)} places us in front of a world as we know it and which, in a certain sense, coincides with the warning that ^{Eagleton (2005)} makes in The Idea of Culture. According to him, the question is part of the logic that produces consequences for the notion of culture resulting from capitalist priorities. Both the scenario described by ^{Augé (2004)} brings us closer to this idea and Eagleton's observation (2005, p. 105) when he states that, “[...] if Culture is thrown into disarray by culture as solidarity, it is also equally threatened by postmodern or cosmopolitan culture. Evidently, we are dealing with culture in the western sense of the term. The point of convergence between the authors is the following: if for ^{Augé (2004)} the problem of the place consists of the inextricable relationship of the identity, relational and historical character, for ^{Eagleton (2005)}, postmodernism rejects both tradition, individuality, and stable and group solidarities. However, as the objective of this article does not lie in the effort to align the thinking of these authors, it is convenient that we stick to the underlying meaning of the two conceptions regarding the idea of a crisis of culture or, in a more convenient way for this text, of the crisis of place.

The situation of the object to which this text is intended finds, so to speak, methodological support insofar as we are referring to a condition whose singularity prevents us from having any sense of fixation. We are referring specifically to teenagers undergoing cancer treatment, whose life stories are permeated by the more explicit character of non-place precisely because of the sense of suspension to which their lives are exposed. In a very short period, the living conditions imposed on them by the treatment - dietary restrictions, daily habits, such as leisure practices and visits to certain social spaces, moving to another city, bodily changes due to the treatment, such as hair loss resulting from chemotherapy or limb mutilations - they place them at the center of the life condition marked by the traits of contemporaneity or the most advanced notion of capitalism. Cancer, in other words, is perhaps the symbol that best embodies the notions of postmodernity in ^{Eagleton (2005)} or super modernity in ^{Augé (2004)}.

The effort to “decipher” or interpret specific characteristics of this period of adolescents' lives is the central object of this discussion. We did it looking for a point of connection between the subjects, namely, the experience of schooling they had during treatment from the mobile school model, and, for that, we included in the analysis the meanings produced by teachers about this reality.

2 Methodology

This research had the participation of teens undergoing treatment and teachers working in the mobile school. We opted for semi-structured interviews, allowing us greater flexibility in the data collection. In all, six teenagers and four teachers belonging to the mobile school were interviewed, although we restricted ourselves to the analysis and interpretation of only seven of the ten subjects, four adolescents and three teachers. In general, we wanted to understand situations in the lives of these adolescents concerning the period before their illness, during the treatment, and how this process was related to the school experience - the school of origin and, later, the mobile school. Regarding the teachers, our attention focused especially on the pedagogical practice limited to the hospital space and on the meanings produced from this condition.

As we have already mentioned, much of this investigation is supported by Marc Augé's theoretical contributions, especially concerning the anthropology of non-place and mobility, in addition to Clifford Geertz's interpretative anthropology. The result of this theoretical composition allowed us access to the interviewees' lives, allowing us to interpret the data obtained in the light of contemporary thinking. We take into account, corroborating Augé's thinking (2004, 2010), the characteristics that escape our object, namely, the identity, relational and historical character as essential characteristics to the notion of place as we traditionally know it. The core point from which all the interpretative work of this study emanates, therefore, lies in the notion of rupture between a “before” and an “after” of the diagnosis, as well as its consequences for the teenagers’ lives. We call the adolescent characters in this study Cristóvão, Ester, Heitor and Joana and the teachers Cindy, Emília and Frederico.

3 Results and discussion

Among the adolescents of this narrative, Ester and Heitor are from the city of São Paulo, although Heitor lives close to the hospital, a well-to-do region of the capital, located on Pedro de Toledo street; and Ester comes from a peripheral region of the city located in the south zone, in the Jardim Ângela neighborhood. This aspect allows us to reflect on the idiosyncrasies related to the adolescents' socialization process coming from very different regions from the point of view of the morphology of cities and which undoubtedly show broader characteristics of Brazilian social inequality.

Cristóvão, born in Belém in the state of Pará, moved to São Paulo as a result of the treatment. The same happened with Joana, from Bahia, born in the small town of Ibotirama. All of them were, in the period in which they were interviewed, between 16 and 17 years old, a period coinciding with the beginning of high school.

The production of meanings about the school experience and life itself as the central articulation of this investigation put us in front of an abundant source of data. It should be noted that the full reading of each narrative that makes up this universe can be accessed through the thesis from which this study originated. In the presentation of the thesis, each story appears separately, protecting the inherent uniqueness of each situation. Here, the effort consisted of articulating, on the one hand, the life stories of adolescents and, on the other hand, the stories narrated from the teachers' perspective.

Let's look at some meanings produced from the experience of the mobile school:

Heitor (student): [...] because, if it wasn't for the mobile school, I would miss the year, right? Because there are people who are missing one, two months and are already on hold! I missed the first six, I was going to... ah... I didn't go a lot. I think that, if I count, like, it was ten days that I went... but the mobile school got in touch with my school, took the... the teachers sent the classes, I took the test here and sent it there, so it went well... [...] then they talked about the mobile school, and then they said: 'In it, you learn at the same pace. It is a teacher for you; It's not one for 40 students'. So I did everything here... sometimes, when I was really bad, I didn't do much, but most of the time I did.

Ester (student): [...] in the public school a teacher is teaching a lot of students, then he ends up getting lost, if you have a question for the teacher, the answer takes a long time to arrive... not here, here is a teacher for a single student, so they pay more attention and it's better for you... the class can happen here, I just had a class, it was Physics, a girl, she taught me right here...

Cristóvão (student): [...] Then the school and here the mobile school, we made a kind of contract, and I took classes here at the mobile school and, when I returned to Belém, I was in the second year of high school. [...] without needing to do summer school. I had 15 days of classes, I think, then I had to come here. If I didn't do it here, I would have to do the 2nd year in the morning and then classes from the 1st year in the afternoon, which is what I was doing at the beginning of the year.

Cristóvão (student): Oh! It helps a lot! In regular school, there would be no special attention to just one student. It is way better. Maximum tranquility. [...] When I arrived, it was a young man who was walking around here, I don't remember his name; I think I even remember, I know he has a file, you know, with everyone's name. He asked if I had already been introduced to the mobile school; I said no, then he wrote down my name in HR [Human Resources], then we started getting in touch with the mobile school, then the mobile school got in touch with my school.

Joana (student): At first, I thought it wasn't a school, you know... a real school class. And I said: 'Is it worth it?' Then I thought it was like a class where the teaching took place. But no, it's a private lesson. [...] they arrive: ‘Hi, Mari. Do you want a class?' 'Look, I'm waiting for an appointment now, but after the appointment... I wait for the appointment to finish, then I'll have the class, alright'.

An odd feeling is present in all speeches. A hint of mistrust, hesitation, and doubt permeates the teenagers' thoughts. There is, after that, a stage of satisfaction when they feel welcomed by this school model. Such estrangement is because many of them do not expect such teaching modality during the treatment. For many teenagers who have just arrived at the hospital, school is something that must be temporarily forgotten, set aside, and put aside from their lives.

The school within the hospital represents, above all, the effort to ensure the inalienable right to education. However, more than that, the school sense, in this context, transcends the mere legal aspect: the right to school continuity restores the meanings of adolescents' lives. They somehow know that they haven’t missed the school year - a notion highly valued in the neoliberal-inspired competitive society. The school's “presence” based on the mobile school model keeps students tied to the education system; something similar to the maxim we see in Zhang Yimou's Chinese film: Not one less³. Now, at the heart of this discussion is the meaning that neoliberalism gives to human investment and that ultimately culminates in its biopolitical dimension as a contemporary phenomenon that consists of including the body in the calculations of the market economy.

The contemporary educational project, mutatis mutandis, operates with the same logic of not losing any student, whether to poverty or disease. The educational project extends beyond the regular school because what ultimately matters is the maintenance of the neoliberal investment logic, which comprises the capture of the individual regardless of any circumstance. What seems to be at stake is the maximum effort that this logic makes to keep the maxim of “not one less” intact. School continuity, far beyond being restricted to the objective aspects that allow students to have contact with knowledge, keeps the engineering gear in operation that produces at every moment a legion of “new consumers”. In addition, as we suggest in this thesis, the specific case of this reality can mean something more than the simple effort for the constitutional guarantee of education.

When we consider the symbolic power of cancer and how it is represented by society, the fear caused by the disease, the apprehension that it produces, as ^{Sontag (1984)} has well observed. The investment here may be related - even if on a pre-reflective level - to the semantics. At the expense of children and adolescents with cancer, it mobilizes a moral code that includes, for example, controlling eating and hygiene habits, and motivations for activities physical, which, in essence, ratify and put into circulation educational principles that serve as the basis for the entire social structure. And, to use the concept of ^{Foucault (2008)}, they operate in favor of the development of human capital, although for this it is necessary to use cancer, as a symbolic vehicle, to directly affect the lives of these children and adolescents. Let's look at this warning from ^{Sontag (1984}, s.p.):

What I intend to describe is not an actual emigration to the realm of sickness and what is like living there, but the punitive or sentimental fantasies forged around this situation; not true geography, but stereotypes of national character. I do not intend to address physical illness per se, but the use of illness as a symbol or metaphor. My point is that illness is not a metaphor and that the most honest way to look at it - and the healthiest way to get sick - is the one that is most cleansed of metaphorical thoughts, that is most resistant to such thoughts. For the time being, it is very difficult to settle in the country of the sick and remain immune to the prejudices arising from the sinister metaphors with which their landscape is described to an elucidation of these metaphors and a release from them that I dedicate this research.

Now, the social symbol that can be inferred from cancer fits neatly with the assumptions that ^{Foucault (2008)} teaches us about the birth of biopolitics. The issue is marked by the sinister connotation we tend to make when we hear the name of this disease. Two feelings are immediately inserted into this symbolic field which, although at first, they appear as strictly individual elements, soon manifest themselves as productions resulting from a larger structure of western society strongly marked by Christian doctrine: the feelings of selfishness and guilt that emerge almost always in a stage of self-acceptance. Let’s take a look:

Heitor (student): Because before I was kind of selfish, I used to say that the person has it because he did something and now he is seeing the effects.

Cristóvão (student): Like, I, I think, was a lot like: ‘It’s mine! It's mine! It's mine! Nobody else can touch it!”. Here you can see that the volunteers give their time to others! Did you understand?

Cristóvão (student, about what he intends to do after the end of treatment): [...] go on with life as... not as it was, right? I wasn't doing so well anymore... I had flunked, and now I'm focusing more, I have to go on with my life. [From what you're saying, then, changed to good things...] Yeah, it just helped me! I don't think the tumor got in the way of some things. I don't see how to get in the way. I think it helped me!

Cristóvão (student): I was famous, the principal knew me [laughs]. [By merits or by...] My brother's merit; he won medals for various things, for Chemistry, for Geography, for everything; he won several medals! He studied at the same school as me. I was known for not [laughs]... he never left the room; I was sent to the principal's office five or six years ago, I don't remember; five or four times. They were on to me. I never did anything! [laughs]. Not. I didn't! [Did you get up a lot?] A little bit. [But what level?] No. it was never too much.

Joana (student): Because before I was different. I thought my life was, like, I want this! I can, I want! So today I think differently. I want to, but now I can't. I will create a methodology to go slower.

There is clearly a sense of guilt that is almost always inextricable from the memory of selfish behavior. The recognition of selfishness produces the feeling of guilt, for the one who is leading a life differently. Thus, by contrast, we can see the strength that religious thought has at the heart of society and that, perpetually, keeps its structure intact: selfish guilt followed by a recognition that flows into the return to the reordering of life through the religious path. In the background, the operation has legions of prodigal sons, backslidden from righteousness, who, once repentant, returns with a second chance to straighten out their ways. This feeling, however, whose source is of religious origin, is not restricted exclusively to its domain. Rather, it focuses on the lives of teenagers, who must redirect their lives. The school experience is one of them. This “second chance” - if they are successful in treatment - mobilizes a feeling of optimism and hope in them.

Continuing schooling continuity during this stage is like if the adolescents signed a contract with the cure, with the certainty that something is invested in their future, in their education, even during this phase, it is because life appears possible again. If there is school continuity, it is because, somehow, forgiveness has already taken place: the school, although it has hundreds of meanings, is seen, in this environment, as the very metaphor for life. The privileged place where there is sharing of ideas, exchange of knowledge, appropriation of knowledge. The idea of humanity is irresistibly linked to its aura: it is the very feeling of vitality that is associated with its image, making teachers and their subjects the closest and most honest to the continuity of life within that context. There is, therefore, more than a feeling of school continuity than just complying with the law. It so happens that through this experience (of school continuity in the hospital environment) is a subtle idea of restoring the school's original meanings, that is, the sense of humanity represented by the notion of sharing knowledge; the sense of vitality that merges with that of school - probably the most fragile aspect in the regular school model, which experiences an erosion of meanings resulting from successive crises of modernity.

4 The presence of death

A fundamental meaning permeating the pedagogical work in the hospital environment: the meaning of death as imminence, an idea that is close to the structure of anomie that Agamben (1897 apud ^{DURKHEIM, 1973}, p. 265-270, emphasis added) tells us about the suicide:

It is a human characteristic to be subject to a restraint that is not physical, but moral, that is, social [...]. However, society is temporarily unable to exercise this action when it is troubled, either by a painful crisis, or be happy, but sudden transformations. Hence the sudden rise in the curve of suicides that we had pointed out [...] Anomie is, therefore, in modern societies, a regular and specific factor of suicide.

What can be inferred from this passage is the character of suspension that, in this space, establishes a kind of state of exception. Unlike the regular school, which imposes this moral brake on students all the time, which controls or, as ^{Foucault (1987)} says, watches over the students’ lives, in the mobile school this model is not possible. Perhaps it could be said because the health institution - the hospital - already does it. The fact is that, from the point of view of the school experience, this characteristic has a very special tone.

When traversed by the uncomfortable notion of death, the school's senses recover a more humanistic, more tolerant, and understanding aura, more concerned with understanding what really “goes wrong” with its student - notions worn out over time in regular school model. We hypothesize that such a state of suspension is due to the presence of death as a power that acts as a counterweight to the formal tradition of the regular school. Regarding death, teachers observe:

Emília (teacher): Because, well, I don't have a religion, I don't see death as something transcendental or something from a spiritual point of view. It's not that I don't have a religion, not that I don't believe in it, it's... it's... that's crazy, because I'm not sure about the transcendental; not that I think everything can be explained from matter, etc.; No. I don't think so, but I don't have this belief in heaven, in God, anyway.

Emília (teacher): [...] we are going to discuss how teachers felt about the death of a student: we don't do it, not that some professionals don't need it, we think that, for example, what the professional needs is to seek support from psychology.

Frederico (teacher): I think so. Some teachers make comments. Not the ones here, people from outside, who say: ‘Wow! You teach in a difficult space, right?'. Because you live with something, let's put it in quotes here, sad, because it's a very serious disease - and some children die and you say: 'Oh my! They had a whole life to live and this happens?' - mutilations, medication all the time, so you do have that side. [And then you have to have a strength, a psychic predisposition...] Exactly. Some people take it harder... If any student dies, then a teacher will come and say, look: 'That happened, then... [noise], the student died, so...'. End up, the set itself ends up giving you data, providing you with stability. At least that's what I felt from all the years I worked here, that it was the group itself that formed the cohesion, that good thing: 'Look: he died!.

Cindy (teacher): Nobody deals with this issue well, right? Death permeates all life, and that is a very difficult question!

Cindy (teacher): And here death is present all the time; this fear, this dread, and you have to deal with it. And even in the classes, there are sensitive and delicate themes and you have to end up talking about them...

Death as a tangible possibility requires teachers to be prepared to bear it. It converges to a spiritual state that aims to include this dimension in a practice that, traditionally, distances itself from the idea of death. As the coercive aspect of the school is amortized in the mobile school model, the bonds of solidarity are reinforced by this threat that, although present, seems to be avoided by all. At least for teachers, death does not occupy the center of attention. It is treated with a certain intentional indifference. At most, one talks informally, among colleagues, when it happens to one of the patients. This meaning puts us in front of the following question: ^{Chauí (1982)} draws our attention to the link between knowledge and death. The philosopher highlights a common point in the philosophies of Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel: the notion that teaching and learning are an art inextricably linked with the idea of death. As a dialogue, learning means getting in touch with the knowledge accumulated in past generations, that is, it means talking to the dead. Teaching, mobilizing knowledge historically produced in a contemporary relationship, is already a function that is linked to death, but it is linked to death only in the sense of stimulating the activity of thought. In The Life of the Spirit,^{Arendt (2012)} discusses this category based on the idea that thought consists of chains of thought that are projected to infinity, produced by the collision between past and future, by the confrontation between the I of presence and the knowledge produced and accumulated by past generations. In the philosopher's words:

The present, which in everyday life is the most futile and slippery of modal times - when I say 'now' and point it out, it is no more - is just the clash between the 'past', which is no more, and the 'future', which is approaching and, however, is not yet it. Man lives in this interval, and what he calls 'the present' is a lifelong struggle against the dead weight of the past, which propels him with hope, and against the fear of the future (whose only certainty is death), which pushes him back to the 'serenity of the past', with nostalgia and the memory of the only reality that man can be sure of. (^{ARENDT, 2012}, p. 227).

When reflecting on this structure, we imagine how the school represents, in this environment, this “serenity of the past” that ^{Arendt (2012)} tells us about, perhaps because the future proves to be more threatening than ever before. What is established in this relationship is a continuous tension between mortality - as an idea close to the notion of cancer - and immortality - related to the knowledge that is mobilized through continued schooling. The thinking ego, in this sense, will be situated on this threshold. The difference between adolescents who experience illness from others lies, therefore, in the production of a meaning that is radically different from that of regular school.

For adolescents who attend regular school, the school experience occupies, perhaps, a meaning that is amalgamated with the production of thoughts that are projected to the future, which remains, in some way, latent until adulthood. For seriously ill teenagers, continued schooling has the opposite feeling: they are allowed to stay in a place in the past, a place where, while things may not be entirely perfect, still allows to be more incisively connected to the human family: this is perhaps the broadest sense that can be gained from the mobile school experience.

5 Final considerations

To correspond to the objective of this study, in which we seek to contribute with elements about the training of teachers within the hospital class, we highlight some topics.

First, we realize that the experience of the mobile school or hospital classes contributes to restoring the essential meaning of schooling, as demonstrated, an inextricable relationship is established between the mobilization of knowledge and the dimension of vitality. We did it based on Augé's (2004) anthropology of non-place, which methodologically allowed us to enter the phenomenon, discarding aspects more common to conventional anthropological research, placing our object in a perspective more or less distant from the notions of identity, historicity and relationship, fundamental aspects for the understanding, for example, of school culture.

In a complementary way to what we presented in the thesis that originated this article, we tried to problematize some aspects related to the experience of the mobile school, doing it through groupings between the subjects: teenagers and teachers. We articulate the problem using the thoughts of contemporary authors to decipher the meanings still latent in the speech of the participants.

As the mobile school modality is a strictly contemporary experience, a space marked by action, a non-place, it is necessary to reflect on it from different angles. The debate about teacher training tends to benefit if it takes into account the aspects that permeate the teacher-student experience in the border space between education and health, from which meanings and interpretations such as those we seek to elaborate on here come.