Studies about teaching have gained significant momentum in the Brazilian educational field since the 1990s, following an international trend. This issue of theRevista Brasileira de Educação offers readers a group of articles by Brazilian and international authors about the problematic of the professional education of teachers, with an emphasis on the themes of reflective educator, practice, professionalization, autobiographies, subjectivities and the professional identity of teachers. The issue also includes articles based on studies related to public policies and the action of government agencies in the sphere of education. The article in the Open Space and the book review reflect the editorial variety of the journal.
The first article, "Concepts of the teacher as researcher and reflective teacher: perspectives about teachers' work," by Tatiana Bezerra Fagundes, problematizes the concepts of teacher-researcher and reflective-teacher, which are broadly used in the field of education, in an effort to reveal the contexts that motivate their constructions in Brazil, and confront them with contemporary educational realities. The intention is to find support for considering the formation and practice of teachers.
The article, "Subjective theories on professors in their professional training," by David Jorge Cuadra Martínez and Jorge René Catalán Ahumada, is a qualitative study conducted with basic education teachers in the region of Atacama, Chile. The purpose of the study is to understand the subjective theory that guides the educational actions of these teachers. The authors analyze the impact of subjective theories on teacher education considering their content, structure and explanatory capacity.
The article, "From woman farmer to secondary teacher in the country: stories, teaching and professionalization," by Jane Adriana Vasconcelos Pacheco Rios, takes the perspective of autobiographical research, and uses as a source narratives about their education, written by teachers who work in rural elementary and high schools in the interior of Bahia State, Brazil. The author articulates the process of identity constitution of the former farmworkers who became teachers and the construction of the teaching profession in rural areas. The discursive place of their community is a fundamental aspect in their professional identity.
Catia Piccolo Viero Devechi, Gionara Tauchen and Amarildo Luiz Trevisan, in the article, "Evolutionary learning in teachers' education: continuity between the certainties of action and discursive arrangements," uses Habermas' perspective of continuation of the world of action and of the discursive world to analyze doctoral theses defended at Brazilian federal universities from 2007 to 2009 about the possibility for evolutive learning in teacher education. They seek to identify the elements that characterize the different epistemological approaches that are most used about the theme: historical-materialist, hermeneutic-phenomenology, epistemology of practice, epistemology of complexity, theory of social representation and post-structuralist.
In the article, "Teacher's identity: challenges posed by globalization," Maria Inês Silva Teixeira Cardoso, Paula Maria Fazendeiro Batista and Amândio Braga Santos Graça argue that theorization about the teaching identity has been disseminated contemporarily causing a shift from a level of non-reflexivity towards a meta-level of reflexive and critical activity, creating tensions between identity in the individual and collective dimensions. This shift has the potential to cause transformative individuals to emerge and in the case of teachers, this transformation will depend on their involvement, professionalism and professional competence.
In the following article, "Methodological trends in teachers who train primary and secondary teachers," Ángel De-Juanas Oliva, Ángel Ezquerra Martínez and Rosa Martín del Pozo argue that in Spain, higher education has received a strong boost, but the methodological foci such as: team work, seminars, debates, etc., do not accompany this development process. The study undertaken with the participation of university teachers who work with the education of elementary and high school teachers, reveals a traditional and intermediary constructivist orientation.
The article, "Cooperation in a heterogeneous federation: the collaboration system of education in six Brazilian states," by Catarina Ianni Segatto and Fernando Luiz Abrucio presents an investigation conducted in Acre, Ceará, Mato Grosso do Sul, Minas Gerais, Pará and São Paulo, that analyzes the action of state governments in the federative coordination process with municipalities in the sphere of education. The study detected various cooperation models between states and municipalities in the states studied, but only one of the six states had a desirable systematic and permanent cooperation model.
The article "The Supremo Tribunal Federal and the guarantee of the right to education" by Elisângela Alves da Silva Scaff and Isabela Rahal de Rezende Pinto, analyzes the action of the Supremo Tribunal Federal [Federal Supreme Court] in relation to legal demands in the field of the right to education of children and adolescents from 2003 to 2012. The authors observe that despite a lack of dialog between the court and the educational field, and the little in-depth work in this field, the position of the STF has been favorable to implementing the right to education, including early childhood education, as a fundamental right.
The article, "Pedagogical mediation in youth and adult education: existential needs and dialogue as a foundation of education practice" by Adriana Regina Sanceverino, presents an investigation about the circumstances and conditions needed to process mediations in situations of teaching and learning of content suitable to the Youth and Adult Education (EJA) program in an elementary school in Santa Catarina State in southern Brazil. The study shows that the mediations of the dialog create conditions to develop critical thinking among students and educational praxis in this teaching modality.
The final article, "Learning in the context of an activity: a theoretical debate confronted by a practical example" by Eduardo Sarquis Soares, Grace Marisa Miranda de Paula and Maria Lúcia Vieira, addresses the question of conceptual change based on a study of teaching practice, highlighting two theoretical positions about the issue. The first, guided by Piagetian constructivism, emphasizes an individual's internal cognitive evolution, and the second, inspired by Vygotsky, highlights the interactions among individuals in learning situations. The authors confront these two approaches in the study, which was conducted with teachers, raising the possibility that these two paradigms can coexist in teaching practice.
In the Open Space section, the text "Dialogues with Marilyn Cochran-Smith on learning and teacher research in communities of inquiry" by Dario Fiorentini and Vanessa Crecci, presents the life and main theoretical constructs proposed by Marilyn Cochran-Smith in collaboration with Susan Lytle, highlighting their Brazilian interlocutors and contributions related to research by teachers about their own practice and the study of learning and the development of teachers in investigative communities. At the conclusion, a complete interview is presented with Cochran-Smith, which was granted to the authors in 2012 at Boston College.
The issue concludes with the review by Thiago Ribeiro Borges, Flávio Aurélio de Souza Prado, Pedro Ricardo Guimarães Veras and Anelise de Barros Leite Nogueira of the book Educação social e psicologia [Social Education and Psychology], by Sueli Maria Pessagno Caro and Raquel Souza Lobo Guzzo. The reviewers highlight the various aspects of social education presented in the book, and address topics related to the characteristics of the field. They emphasize the main aspects required for satisfactory action of social educators and the state of this field of knowledge in Brazil's educational reality. The authors highlight that one of the main contributions of the book is to offer a greater understanding about the identity and action of the social educator, especially in the university context.
Various articles in this issue address the education of basic education teachers and their working conditions in different educational contexts and modalities. Given the contemporary nature of their questionings, the pertinence of their theoretical, conceptual and methodological references, and their concerns for daily classroom practices, the articles offer important contributions for a critical review of the literature and an intensification of the debate about new guidelines for teacher education. The studies presented here highlight the centrality of professors as individuals and their potential as intellectuals, both in the analysis and reflexive interpretation of their continuous educational process, and in a political redimensioning of their social participation. These contributions of educational research that reveal the action of teaching in various educational environments, marked by specific intercultural and cultural characteristics, strengthen perspectives that invert an applicationist and technicist logic in teacher education. The articles sustain a biographical reasoning, which seriously considers the recognition of the historicity of the teachers' own learning processes and the tensions in which their professional identities and belongings are shaped.
We wish good reading to all.
Rio de Janeiro, April 2016
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Apr-Jun 2016
