Professores de língua portuguesa e matemática: representações sociais sobre a docência

Abstract

This work develops from the larger Project entitled ¿The Teacher of Elementary Education II: policies, practices and representations¿, and aims to analyze and understand the representations about the teaching of Portuguese and Mathematics Teachers, who work in final years of Public Elementary School in the metropolitan region of Baixada Santista (RMBS). In this perspective it is based on the Theory of Social Representations (TRS) (MOSCOVICI, 1978, 2003, 2012), complemented by the Theory of the Central Nucleus (ABRIC, 1996, 1998, 2001), introducing a brief reflection on the concept of identity, discussed by Dubar (1998, 2005, 2006), Hall (2000), Placco e Souza (2010, 2011) among the others. The study takes a qualitative and quantitative research approach, structured in the following phases: application of a questionnaire to 157 teachers, 90 of them in the Portuguese Language and 67 in Mathematics; interviews with 11 teachers, including 15 narratives, which deal with their training and teaching practice in an attempt to capture what teaching means and the reasons that led them to choose this profession. The selection of these teachers fell back for teaching subjects, which are at the ¿front line¿ of large-scale assessments, facing challenges and pressures for satisfactory results in assessments, such as SAEB and SARESP. It was found that the research subjects anchor the meaning of teaching in two dimensions: personal and professional. The first emphasizes the image that subjects have of teaching from the inside out, carrying the sense of learning as a continuous process and, as a consequence, as an action that enriches the profession and promotes social changes; the second, professional, would be the image that the subjects have of the teaching exercise, from outside to inside, bringing their thinking involved in the action of ¿teaching¿, which translates into essentiality when it instigates life transformation. These dimensions unfold into seven units of meaning, which intertwine, mapping teaching as idealized, as an instrument of transformation, vocation, devalued and an exercise of the profession linked to significant experiences and dilemmas, of transformation and affection. The empirical data demonstrate that the professors, subjects of the research, represent and give a status to teaching as a missionary, redemptive and transforming individuals and society. Thus, teachers produce, communicate and share the thought of essentiality to teaching from the constitution of an identity knowledge, which characterizes it as a producer of meaning in the context of social transformation.