Formação para o magistério: o discurso dos formadores

Abstract

In the last decade, the formation of teachers for the first grades has been object of an extensive debate, in which we could observe theoretical controversies, normative ambiguities, as well as a wide variety of curricula implemented by the universities. Given this scenery we considered relevant to investigate how teachers of university courses of Education, that is, the responsible for the formation of those teachers represent this process. The option for the theoretical-methodological referential of the social representations is due to the fact that they have the function of contributing to the construction of a common reality to a social set and to orientate and justify practices of the subjects that compose it. Data was collected through a test of free evocation with justification applied to 51 teachers of the Education course and 15 interviews. The teachers, in general, presented a fragmented discourse, full of expressions taken from the current literature, without being able to give a coherent image of what would be teacher formation. Among these expressions, reflexive teacher is the most frequent, apparently used as a jargon rather than as a well-assimilated concept. These results lead us to question the existence of a representation of teacher formation among these teachers, suggesting that they only have opinions, or even attitudes, but not a structured representation. It was considered that the existence of two rationalities in dispute, in the discussions related to the Curricular Guidelines for the Education course, as well as in the literature about teacher formation, contributed for the dispersion observed in the answers to the association test and in the interviews.