The paper deals with a proposal of institutional self - evaluation carried out in a public school of urban periphery that receives students from popular classes. This demarcation requires that we consider the articulation between school action, theories that support it and the processes that constitute it and the social dynamics. In peripheral countries, such as Brazil, the education project is historically marked by disputes between meanings that refer to social processes to subaltern or libertarian social processes. The school universalization is both an important device for socialization and the legitimation of a single vision of the world, including the justification of inequality, and an important tool in the social transformation process. Educational assessment is produced in this movement. To carry out a democratic process still constitutes a challenge to the school action, where the evaluation predominates as instrument of control and hierarchy of subjects, processes and practices. Institutional self-evaluation is an important modality in democratic evaluation when viewed from a comprehensive perspective as a critical part of the learning process. As the school saw in the self-assessment a possibility of intensifying its process of democratization, it mobilized to carry it out, involving the school community (teachers, students, their families and other school professionals). The research results from the school's need to have a follow-up of the process of preparing and conducting self-assessment. The project was conducted by the pedagogical team, in partnership with the researcher, to develop a qualitative process that allows entering the complexity of school life to understand the processes and results achieved, improve curriculum development and strengthen collective work. The effective presence of representatives of all the segments that composes the school community throughout the process, involved in a deep reflection on the quality of the education carried out, is indispensable to its realization as a dialogical practice. The questions that guided the study are: a) the possibility of this process to be translated into a practice of democratic evaluation, with effective participation of the subjects; b) the teacher's appropriation of the evaluation result in the composition of the curriculum and the pedagogical practice; c) the process of integrating children into the evaluation dynamics; d) the students' perception about the school, which emerges from the evaluation. The participation of children in self-evaluation stands out because it requires the construction of a specific methodology, so that they are not simply informants but are subjects of the actions undertaken and the reflective process about the different dimensions that constitute the school practice. This paper deals specifically with the last two issues, more directly related to child participation. By taking school practices as socio-cultural practices, the debate on the process of constitution of modernity/coloniality, following the Latin America critical tradition, is relevant to the discussion of the historical role of the school as a strategy to subaltern practices. Keeping the Latin America's glance, researches commitment with social transformation has in studies in the field of Popular Education necessary references, especially as it relates to politics, reflective and dialogic dimensions of the work and the relationship of school with the popular classes knowledge production. Also included in the framework are critical theories in the field of educational assessment within what is presented as an assessment for learning, giving relevance to ethical and political issues, based on the concepts of dialogue and liberation/emancipation. Equally relevant are the studies on child participation referred by the sociology of childhood.

This is a qualitative research developed in a public school for children below the age of 11, engaging different groups of the school community in the reflection about the pedagogic process in the school daily life. The practice is simultaneously the origin and finality of the research in a movement in which practice and theory are two dimensions mutually in tension. Its collaborative feature indicates some connections with participatory action research, especially the emphasis in the practice on the school's work, the reflection about lived experience in dialogue with the theory, besides the preoccupation with the value of the research of the people in the school community and its capacity for a solidary creation of knowledge from the school and about the school. The relationship with popular education brings dialogue as a method, which requires the sharing of responsibilities, the negotiation of concerns and meanings, and the commitment to the intentions of the work. The dialogic method is also relevant for the subjects to identify in their contexts the challenges to be faced in the development of the research and to ensure that the decisions are shared with the participants. It is important to consider that the popular classes occupy a subordinate position in society. Although research involves all school groups, this paper specifically addresses children's participation. So, their voices need to be considered, which implies the development of speech skills and listening attitudes. At the same time, procedures designed to allow the use of different languages are required. In order to promote a comfortable environment for students, all proposals on the participation of children in the evaluation process have been integrated into everyday school activities. Teachers and researcher collaborate to develop proposals according to classroom work to connect children to the assessment of school life, including classroom practices. At the beginning of the research, there were no tools or structured procedures, they were produced while working. This material was organized to: a) reconstruct the history of the process, since, based on an initial proposal, each class produced its own trajectory; b) analyze the information around two axes: the conception of children's participation in school and the dynamics of teaching / learning, according to the children.

The analysis of the material produced by the students in the process of institutional self-evaluation affirms the relevance of this practice for the democratization of the school. The reconstruction of the history of the process indicates the existence of a movement towards the elaboration of instruments that increase the possibility of child participation, with a deepening of dialogue and shared reflection. Although there is a growing participation of children in the evaluation of the teaching / learning process, there are more consultation procedures than participation. Two ways of seeing the student coexist in school life and are also evidenced in the perception of the child as a subject of rights, alongside an understanding of childhood as necessarily subordinate to the adult; as well as in the presence of opposite ideas about the school: a space that marks the public action of the child and a place of tutelage of the child. However, the child's voice is present in the assessment process, although attention needs to be paid to the place the child is allowed to occupy. In relation to the dynamic teaching / learning, the children express a positive vision of themselves and of the school. In relation to the dynamic teaching / learning, the children express a positive vision of themselves and of the school: they see themselves learning, in a school that teaches. However, their observations suggest that there is insufficient pedagogical action to configure the classroom and school as collective spaces for sharing and producing knowledge, which requires intensifying dialogue with children. The paper exposes the need to expand the democratic dimension of the evaluation, still tied to asymmetrical power relations, characteristics of subaltern societies and brings as a question the possibility of a real affiliation of the school evaluation to a liberating dialogic perspective.

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