Session Information
10 SES 02 C, Motivations and Considerations on Becoming a Teacher
Paper Session
Contribution
The initial (ITE) and continued teacher education are essential to the development in every country, whatever the size of its population or its economic growth. Nowadays, in search of improving the teacher formation standards, it is possible to identify several ITE proposals around the world. In Europe, for instance, to become a certificated teacher requires a master's level in education. This model of ITE, as presented in the European Commission document concerning Erasmus+ goals (CAENA, 2014), emphasizes the importance of the school/University partnership at this stage. On the other hand, the instruction concerning specific knowledge subjects, as the scientific ones, precedes the reflections concerning the classroom competencies to work well with the pupils.
In Brazil, the initial formation of the high school teachers is performed through a specific track that differs from the one that leads to the Bachelor's degree. The teacher initial formation undergraduate courses include subjects of the pedagogical area, the specific subject matter, and the teaching practices. However, traces of the previous training model adopted in Brazil for the teacher certification (in which the pedagogical subjects were crammed all together in the last year) still show. Today, a consequence of this model is that the undergraduate students have contact with the school context only near the end of their undergraduate courses, at the most of the formation institutions. The literature (ZEICHNER et al, 2012) points out that a severe problem related to the teachers´ training is the gap in the articulation between University and School.
The Brazilian Federal government established an ITE policy action that aims at strengthening the partnership between the University and the public High Schools and to anticipate the articulation between the subject knowledge achievement and the teaching practices of the future teachers. Another goal is to enhance the recruitment into the High School teacher career. So, this policy implemented scholarships to all ITE players: teacher educators, student teachers, and high school teachers. In the context of this program, practices as the studying of the school context and actions in different school spaces, such as classrooms and laboratories are developed to test and evaluate teaching strategies.
In these actions, the "Institutional Scientific Initiation Scholarship Program" (PIBID) counts on the participation of undergraduate students, the University teacher (Supervisor) and the High School teacher. The Supervisor is in charge of the planning of activities with the undergraduate students, on demand by the School teacher. In a previous communication to ECER/2016 (REZENDE; VOGEL, 2016) we presented evidence that the partnership between universities and schools from the initial stages of the undergraduate specific course is essential in the student teacher formation. Our results show that the development of the pedagogical contents aligned with the acquisition of the specific knowledge leads to an improvement in ITE, in line with the literature reports (ZEICHNER, 2010). The collection and analysis of the data were performed in the Social Representation (SR; Moscovici, 2008) theory perspective. This theory leads to the comprehension of the meaning that a social group attributes to an object, and to how it is shared.
In this context, since the Supervisors have a pivotal role in the students´ teacher education, to understand their SR concerning "being a chemistry teacher" can unveil the motivations underlying the formative activities design implemented in the particular PIBID project under their supervision. So, the main objective of the present communication is to report the current results of our ongoing research concerning the SR of PIBID supervisors settled in various Brazilian universities on their ontological conception about “being a chemistry teacher", a tool to perceive their influence in this ITE Brazilian Program.
Method
In-depth interviews were carried out with 4 PIBID supervisors, which goal is to get the participants reconstruction of their experiences related to the topic under study (SEIDMAN, 1997). In the interview, the supervisors expressed their conceptions concerning ITE and the main details about the PIBID project under their coordination, such as the number of members and the type of activities developed in the project. The transcription of the interviews and its analysis were performed in two main steps, to unveil this SR of the PIBID supervisors. In the first step, we proceded to the similarity analysis (supported by IRAMUTEQ software) aiming to evaluate the terms´ connectivity. In the obtained similarity grapho we can identify co-occurrence values that indicate the most significant elements of the text. This analysis shows the cohesion of these terms of an SR (BOURICHE, 2003) through a similarity graph in which the words co-occurrence values indicate the most robust relationships between the words, revealing some aspects of the symbolic value of the representation symbolic value. In the second step, the content analysis (BARDIN, 1977) inspires the interpretative phase, a usual approach to performing communication analyzes. The content analysis leads to the attribution of the meaning to the data constructed by the similarity analysis and to the SR of the social group under investigation.
Expected Outcomes
The similarity analysis shows pairs of terms with significant values of connectivity: (1) “school/undergraduate student” and (2) “undergraduate student/school teacher”, which meaning is giving by content analysis. (1): the PIBID supervisors express the importance of the school context to the students practice of the knowledge they acquired both in undergraduate course as during the teacher’s formation, through the development of the activities and group meetings that are part of PIBID. It enables the reflection of the undergraduate students concerning the knowledge acquired in the university in a serious and critic way because their contact with the school context demands of them to re-think their certainties. The practice actions performed in school create opportunities for the modification of the student's views about the school context; experienced from a new perspective in relation to the one they have as pupils. So, there is a change in their conceptions about the school, the teaching career, and the teaching-learning process. In most cases, the undergraduate students that join PIBID are at the beginning of their ITE course. So, this initial insertion can contribute to the identification with the teaching profession that is central to the ITE. (2): an essential aspect in the relation of undergraduate students and high school teachers is related to the way that it is developed. This relationship is not hierarchical in the group, involving discussions about theories and pedagogical practices. There is also an exchange of experiences and joint elaboration of the activities to be developed in the school classes. The university supervisor, therefore, also contributes to the continuum formation of those Secondary school teachers that are scholarship holders, including their experiential knowledge in the undergraduate formative process. This kind of experience, acquired in the classroom practice, cannot be obtained only from the theory addressed at the University.
References
Bardin, L. (1996). L'analyse de contenu. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Le Psychologue, 69, 6 ed, 291p. Bouriche, B. (2003). L'analyse de similitude. In J-C. Abric (Dir.), Méthodes d'étude des représentations sociales (pp. 221-252). Ramonville Sait-Agnes: Erés. Caena, F. (2014) Initial teacher education in Europe: an overview of policy issues.Directorate-General for education and Culture School. ET2020 Working Group on Schools Policy. European Commission/EACEA/EURYDICE. (2015). The teaching profession in Europe: practice, perceptions, and policies. (Eurydice Report). Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. Moscovici, S. (2008). Psychoanalysis. Its Image and its Public. Cambridge: Polity Press. SEIDMAN, I. (1997). Interviewing as qualitative research: A guide for researchers in education and the social sciences. New York: Teachers College Press. Rezende, D.B.; Vogel, M. (2016) The Social Representation of teachers in initial formation regarding 'being a Chemistry Teacher? In: European Conference of Educational Research, 2016, Dublin. European Conference of Educational Research. Retrieved from: http://www.eera-ecer.de/ecer-programmes/pdf/print/conference/21/contribution/38438/ Zeichner, K. (2010). University-Based Teacher Education: Rethinking the Connections Between Campus Courses and Field Experiences in College and University-Based Teacher Education. Journal of Teacher Education, 61, 89-99. Zeichner, K.; Payne, K.; Brayko, K. (2012). Democratizing knowledge in university teacher education through practice-based methods teaching and mediated field experience in schools and communities. Issue Paper. University of Washington-Seattle Center for the Study of Teacher Learning in Practice. Retrieved from: http://www.ccte.org/wp-content/pdfs-conferences/ccte-conf-2012-fall-zeichner-democratizing-knowledge.pdf
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