Ser estudante sendo docente: por que os docentes se qualificam?

Abstract

Countless requirements, expectations, and changes have been taken into account concerning both the teaching and the scholastic areas. Teachers have been facing a sequence of tensions and conflicts which may put at risk even their professional development. On one hand, they find themselves committed with the teaching process and students´ learning; on the other hand, they submit to constant requirements from educational public politics. A great part of these politics ends up demanding more efforts from teachers in order to achieve their objectives. In this way, this research analyzes the reasons that take teachers to a higher qualification to develop their work. This analysis was carried out mainly through oral statements set by Primary School teachers who face a double experience process: teaching and teachers qualification courses. These courses were run by a particular community University in two towns on the southern region of Rio Grande do Sul – Pelotas and Canguçu. As a base reference, it is taken the analysis of Karl Marx concerning the social relationships established in the capitalist way of production (1981; 1982; 1989) and the studies of Lüdke; Boing (2004), Oliveira (2004, 2005), Sampaio; Marin (2004), Vieira (2004), as well as the studies of Apple (1987), Ball (1994, 2001, 2005), Bonafé (1999), Esteve (1995), Hargreaves (1998), Huberman (1995) e Lawn (2001), concerning the content of the educational reshuffles and the changes in the teaching practice. Various data presented in this research were collected basically from two types of sources: individual questionnaires applied to a range of teachers and students who were regularly enrolled in two groups of the courses mentioned above, and interviews conducted with a small sample of teachers and students; these interviews were chosen according to the teachers´/students´ experiences and particularities concerning the teaching area; this methodology made researchers go deeper into research aims: investigating what incites teachers to qualify themselves targeting their teaching performance; verifying how teachers have been dealing with the requirements imposed by the double experience process: teaching and professional qualification. Some teachers who had already been teaching, and that had no higher qualification, were considered, in this research, as the ones to take part of the qualification courses.The empirical research showed that despite teachers and students do not think they are less prepared than others to develop their jobs, they get enrolled in qualification courses. This is probably due to a natural, but not normal, disqualification of teachers’ staff as a whole, and the responsible factors for this disqualification are some current teaching politics which have been applied in Brazil and in other Latino-American countries since the 1990s. The initiative of offering the courses, which did not have to do with teachers´ previous needs, pointed that in almost all cases there was an intensification of the teaching practice, proving that all time dedicated to the professional qualification as well as to the organization of private life, of leisure activities, and resting time, are dependent upon the time available for work.