Tomada de Consciência sobre a prática docente e a formação inicial na educação infantil: com a voz, as professoras licenciadas em educação infantil na UFV

Abstract

Piaget, when building concepts about the awareness of action, states that this does not occur through enlightenment, but through successive constructions, elaborated by the subjects of knowledge, based on disturbances caused by the “other” in a situation of interaction . Faced with these epistemological conceptions, we asked ourselves: How do the graduates of the Early Childhood Teacher Education become aware about their teaching practices and their initial education? To do so, we set out to analyze this awareness process of graduates of the Early Childhood Teacher Education at UFV, through representations about their initial education and their teaching practice with babies and young children. To subsidize the reflections, this research is anchored in the studies “raising awareness”, “doing and understanding” by Jean Piaget, as well as the studies that discuss the initial the Early Childhood Teacher Education. In the case of teachers, the construction of their own concepts about “doing” is what will reverberate in “understanding” and, later, in the different ways of explaining their actions internalized in the form of thought. The theoretical-methodological framework is of a qualitative nature, carried out through a Case Study, in this case, the Early Childhood Teacher Education at UFV. Data production took place through documentary research, questionnaire, and virtual conversation circles (RCV). The five RCVs carried out were inspired by the technique of reflective sessions and the Piagetian clinical method through systematic interventions. The teachers participating in the research are the graduates of the program under study from 2015 to 2020 who were working with children from 0 to 5 years old in Viçosa-MG. The analysis of the data produced in the RCVs was carried out taking into account the theoretical framework on awareness according to Piaget (1978a;1978b) and also by theoretical discussions on Early Childhood Teacher Education. In order to analyze the teachers' narratives/speech, we created levels of awareness, categorizing them into level I - description of the action, level IIA - explanation, level IIB - argumentation, level IIC - understanding and level III - conceptualization. With these levels of awareness and the representations of the teachers it was possible to discover that, in and between each RCV, they were elaborating more complex answers about initial training and its contribution to their teaching practice. Based on systematic interventions and possibilities for group reflection, the teachers developed concepts that moved between the most elementary levels of awareness, at the beginning of the RCVs and during the first RCVs, advancing to more complex levels of awareness (reflected abstractions), as the RCVs took place. We identified, as the RCVs were occurring, that the teachers referred to the experiences and knowledge built during their initial training to reflect on their teaching practice by elaborating and (re)elaborating concepts on the themes that were discussed in the RCVs sessions. Such elucidations announce the need for teacher training courses to prioritize, in their curricular documents, theoretical-practical experiences since the beginning of the teacher education programs at universities. Only then will it be possible to provide reflective movements in real teaching situations.