A docência como artesania: por um pensar e agir hermenêutico

Abstract

This dissertation is the result of the encounter between the teaching exercised by a teacher-researcher and the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002). The question that triggers the research and the teacher's teaching is how to overcome the students' resistance to learning school content and, at the same time, how to resist to the educational project based on technical-instrumental rationality. For this, an in-depth study is undertaken on resistance, from the perspective of the teacher's movement, defending its positive aspect in education. This involves the criticism and the creation, based on Foucault, Freire and Gadamer. The dissertation has as analysis material the teacher's pedagogical documentation, constituted between the years 2013 to 2020. The theoretical-methodological basis of the research is philosophical hermeneutics. This investigation engages with the concept of pedagogical handicrafts and with eight hermeneutic principles: the ethics, the aesthetics, the questions, the dialogue, the language, the experience, the tradition and the training; principles that make the teacher's work visible as a testimony of a unique practice. The handicrafts are assumed as a teacher's capacity for reflection and action with regards to issues faced at school, this self-reflection on the educational meaning of gestures, thoughts and speeches, hers and the students, performs the movement of understanding of the documentation as way to avoid the dichotomy between theory and practice. This handcraft encompasses a set of techniques, procedures, theories, experiences and examples given by tradition, which allows for sustaining the teaching as a practical philosophy (Gadamer's) or a practical wisdom (Greek phronesis). This is because, when arranged through diversified pedagogical documentation constituted by the teacher, this handcraft guides her pedagogical thinking and doing. In this way, the dissertation argues that a teaching arranged through pedagogical handicrafts - guided by principles of a hermeneutic pedagogy - gives a new meaning to the school, enabling its reinvention when facing the resistance of the students and resistance to the educational project based on the technical-rationality instrumental.