Desenvolvimento da profissionalidade docente: representações de professoras dos anos iniciais da educação básica

Abstract

This research, developed during the participation in the Study and Research Group on Teaching Work (Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas sobre o Trabalho Docente - GEPTRADO), has as object the representations, understood from the relation between conceived and lived (LEFEBVRE, 1983) and, in this case, refer to the professionality of teachers. The research problem was outlined as follows: what are the teachers’ representations of the initial years of Elementary School about the development of their professionality? The investigation sought to analyze the components mentioned by the teachers for the development of their professionality, through the conduction of narratives related to their training. The discussions are presented from the studies of Bourdieu (2009), Giroux (1997) and Lefebvre (1983). The objectives of this doctoral dissertation were: a) to identify, through analytical interpretations, the representations of teachers of the Municipal Education Network of Ponta Grossa, Paraná, Brazil, regarding the development of teaching professionality; b) unveil how teachers perceive themselves during the process of professional development in the teaching career; and c) to discuss the elements that teachers of the initial years of Elementary School consider as foundations for teacher professionality. From three schools in the Municipal Education Network of Ponta Grossa, which, according to the network report, had a larger number of teachers who were retired by the National Institute of Social Security (known as INSS) and were still teaching, the subjects of this investigation were found: eight teachers from the initial years of Elementary School. This study was developed from the qualitative approach and, used, as a research methodology, narratives of the teachers’ training, from the perspective of Catani and Vicentini (2006) and Souza (2006), and discussion groups on how their category identifies the conditions of their work and how teachers perceive autonomy in the exercise of teaching. The data were analyzed with the process of decomposition of the whole into its constituent parts, from the Discursive Textual Analysis (DTA), proposed by Moraes and Galliazi (2006, 2007). As results, the relations that the teachers bring about the specific knowledge of teaching, the autonomy in their work and the social recognition of the teaching profession are placed. It is considered that the common points, since entering and throughout the teaching career of the participating teachers in the study, are scarcer in relation to the singular points of the professional trajectories, which reveals the heterogeneity between the path taken in the same profession, being the teaching profession under preparation by the category. Three categories emerged throughout the research, namely: teachers’ representations about specific knowledge of the education professional; representations of teachers about autonomy in the teaching career; and representations of teachers about social recognition of the teacher. Throughout the narratives of the participating teachers, human relations were in a position of evidence; however, silences appeared in the case of understandings about education policies and their relationship with the teaching process. The ambiguities about teaching were also clear in relation to: imitation of models for acting in classrooms or training for the composition of the teacher’s specific knowledge; isolation or professional autonomy and wage devaluation versus social 10 recognition. Such contradictory positions, revealed through narratives of teacher education and also through the discussion group, denote that the process of professionalism in teaching is still in movement of construction.