Perfil dos professores de química do município de Juiz de Fora: sua formação inicial, continuada e o exercício profissional

Abstract

The present work investigates in-service teacher formation. It examined the profile of chemistry teachers in Juiz de Fora, Brazil in relation to initial and continuing teacher education and professional life, taking in accordance its perception. The research is based on a questionnaire answered by 35 teachers of chemistry during the second semester of 2010 and on interviews with six of them. The quantitative data obtained from this questionnaire were compared with national data to ascertain the real situation in the city of Juiz de Fora. The discursive answers and the interviews from this questionnaire were analysed according to the emergent categories. We classified the teachers according to their gender, age, basic, initial and continuing teacher education and professional education. The results show that formation of teachers is limited to their personal past experiences in the classroom as students, and we infer that their initial teacher education made a limited contribution, owing to their distance from the reality, and the stage occurring just like the application of the theory, without the work together between the teacher from the superior course, the future teacher and the teacher from the basic education. We believe that teacher formation should be revisited, to break the link with personal past experiences and to seek appropriate input for the construction of future teachers. The present formation results in the devaluation of continuing teacher education in the area of chemistry education, limiting the performance of the teachers inside the scientific community in terms of improving chemical knowledge.