Professores de línguas em formação inicial e a constituição da identidade de professor-autor

Abstract

Pre-service context is widely explored by researchers when addressing the identity of language teachers. This occurs because the initial teacher training is a favorable environment for the development of knowledge that constitutes professional identity (Dubar, 2005). The teacher’s identity is formed by a set of knowledge, skills, and abilities that is named teaching knowledge (Tardif, 2014). This teaching knowledge includes the authorship of teaching materials, an experiential knowledge structured by at least four elements: affectivity, criticality, pedagogical intentionality, and technological-pedagogical fluency (Alves, 2023). Teachers need opportunities to create and/or adapt teaching materials to develop and mobilize the four structuring elements of authorship and build their identity as teacher-authors. Therefore, this research aims to investigate the perception of the identity constitution of the teacher-author within the context of pre-service language teachers at the Federal University of Pelotas. Students from the 4th and 8th semesters of Portuguese-English Teaching Degree and Portuguese Teaching Degree were the target audience. The courses’ pedagogical projects and a semi-open questionnaire were used to collect data. Documentary analysis was used to identify opportunities to create teaching materials available in the curricula. Meanwhile, content analysis was used to identify the foundational elements of teaching material authorship in the narratives and to comprehend the participants’ perceptions of their authorship. This research followed a qualitative perspective and it involved data from twenty-eight participants. The results indicate the existence of authorship opportunities in the pedagogical projects investigated. However, the dual teaching degree concentrates these moments in the teaching internship courses, while the single teaching degree spreads the opportunities throughout the curriculum. Furthermore, all the students mobilize at least one of the four foundational elements of teaching material authorship, with pedagogical intentionality and technological-pedagogical fluency being the most prevalent in the narratives. Finally, the results also show the presence of teacher-authors among the participants but a low level of identification of pre-service teachers with this role. In this way, this study aims to contribute to discussions related to the development of teaching identity, particularly the teacher-author identity, in language teacher training.