Identidades Profissionais Construídas na Prática Docente

Abstract

This study aims at analysing the Professional education path followed by a group of elementary school teachers in charge of initial grades, focusing on the construction of their identities along this way. The subjects of this research are a group of teachers (N=127) currently enrolled in a Teacher Education course at the undergraduate level in Rio de Janeiro. The analysis of data took into account a questionnaire as well as semistructured interviews. Results indicated that school knowledge is a central element of meaning reflecting in different samples of discourse the dynamics of the construction of teacher identity in its different expressions and positioning, among which a free association test triggered off by this expression. The task of transmitting school knowledge underscores the centrality of the teacher in the context of the pedagogical institution. It also legitimizes the great value attributed to the activity of teaching as well as the idealization of the teacher’s mission. These idealized conceptions are put forward as a consensus that gathers and assembles the different identities present in each of the subjects and in the group as a whole. Even though school knowledge is considered important and necessary, it is also perceived as distant from students’ lives, as difficult to transmit due to inadequate pedagogical resources, to students’ limitations and to crises in social and family structure. This type of knowledge is based – according to teachers – on the academic structure encompassing the different subjects, on text books, on what happens in classrooms, on efforts to achieve discipline in schools and on many other issues that contribute to the perception of school knowledge as pre-established, reified content. To sum up, school knowledge is seen as both the success factor and the insurmountable obstacle to the achievement of the task of teaching, carried out amid conflicting formulations that allow for the emergence of multiple and hybrid professional identities of teachers.