SciELO - Scientific Electronic Library Online

 
vol.37The virtual community of practices for trainers’ educators: an invitation to write narratives about lived experiencesArchive Fever - A Challenge to the Philosophy of Education? author indexsubject indexarticles search
Home Pagealphabetic serial listing  

Services on Demand

Journal

Article

Share


Educar em Revista

Print version ISSN 0104-4060On-line version ISSN 1984-0411

Educ. Rev. vol.37  Curitiba  2021  Epub Apr 19, 2021

https://doi.org/10.1590/0104-4060.75677 

ARTICLE

Shared narratives in the formation of the beginning teacher1

Vanessa França Simas* 
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4250-3277

*Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Campinas, São Paulo, Brasil. E-mail: vanessafsimas@gmail.com.br


ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to describe how the process of interlocution between a beginner teacher and a group of educational professionals occurred through narratives that the first one wrote about her teaching practice and sent to the group. The beginning teacher was also a researcher who investigated the process of her constitution as a teacher at the first stage of her career. The narratives about her practice and the narrative inquiry were amplified by other descriptions written by subjects with whom she shared her school routine in the group of interlocutors, for this reason, this research has a self/hetero/biographical nature. The methodology used to understand this interlocutory process was the narrative inquiry, alongside with some contributions of the Bakhtinian framework. The data were composed of teachers’ narratives and the enunciation of a group of interlocutors. The movements of narrating and sharing these writings enable her a surplus of vision of the self, of relationships and events, since she placed herself into another space and time at her moments of writing, thus building other understandings of what had already been lived, as well as creating memories of the future related to teaching. The acts of narrating her practice and sharing these narratives proved to be powerful assets in the formation of beginner teachers.

Keywords: Narratives; Teacher formation; Beginning teacher; Bakhtin and the Circle

RESUMO

O objetivo do presente artigo é revelar como ocorreu o processo de interlocução entre uma professora iniciante e um grupo de profissionais da educação, através de narrativas que a primeira escrevia sobre a própria prática pedagógica e enviava a esse grupo. A professora iniciante era também a pesquisadora que investigava como se constituía docente nessa fase da carreira. As narrativas sobre a própria prática e a narrativa da pesquisa eram ampliadas pelas narrativas dos sujeitos com quem a professora convivia no cotidiano escolar e no grupo de interlocutoras, por isso a pesquisa tem um cunho auto/hetero/biográfico. A metodologia narrativa de pesquisa em educação, em diálogo com os aportes da filosofia bakhtiniana, foi a utilizada para compreender esse processo interlocutivo. A materialidade a ser interpretada foi composta pelas narrativas da professora e do grupo de interlocutoras. Revelou-se que os movimentos de narrar e de compartilhar esses escritos potencializaram excedentes de visão de si, das relações e dos acontecimentos, já que ela se colocava num outro espaço e num outro tempo no momento da escrita, construindo outras compreensões para o já vivido, bem como memórias de futuro relativas à docência. Os atos de narrar a própria prática e compartilhar essas narrativas se mostraram potentes no processo formativo de professoras iniciantes na carreira docente.

Palavras-chave: Narrativas; Formação de professores; Professor iniciante; Bakhtin e o Círculo

The challenge of the solitary beginning of teaching

Some studies reveal that there is generally an individualism constitutive of the school culture (HARGREAVES, 1996; HARGREAVES; FULLAN, 2014). The organization of work in the school environment may present time limitations, fragmented structures, lack of communication between school and community, thus placing teachers2 in this position of individualistic work (BOLÍVAR; BOLÍVAR-RUANO, 2016).

Concerning beginning teachers (HUBERMAN, 2007; MARCELO, 2007, 2009; TARDIF, 2010) this situation seems to be even more aggravating, since they usually start to work in a school without a follow-up program and, therefore, may come across an island work, having nobody to talk to them about their pedagogical practice. As it is unusual for the beginning teacher to have this follow-up assistancesupport that this professional receives can sometimes be limited to something informal - a quick conversation through the corridors or a question answered between one class and another - by professionals working in the same school. Ingersoll and Smith (2003) demonstrate through their research that a large number of these professionals give up in the first five years of teaching.

The complexity and loneliness that often surround the first socialization of teachers at the beginning of their careers can be overcome with collective work and with the assurance of an established space and time for dialogue with colleagues of the same profession. Some researches (BRZOSKA et al., 1987; MARCELO, 2009; SMIT; DU TOIT, 2016) reveal the importance of a senior teacher willing to accompany the beginning teacher during the beginning of her/his teaching. Such researches advocate for the implementation of training and support plans for professionals who are at the beginning of their careers, through mentoring. Other researches (NEVE; DEVOS, 2016) highlight the importance of forming learning communities (HARGREAVES; FULLAN, 2014) in the first stages of teaching. However, even in this context, incipient are the works that discuss the relevance of these learning communities from the perspective of the beginning teachers who research their pedagogical practice, associated with an exercise of narrative writing.

This paper is inserted in the field of narratives shared during the beginning of the teaching career. We deal with a particular case of a beginning teacher who researched how to become a teacher at the beginning of her career, accompanied by a collective of education professionals outside her school environment. The interlocutions between the beginning teacher and the group that accompanied her work took place through narratives written by the first and sent to this group, which, in turn, responded to her narratives. Therefore, this research has the perspective of a beginning teacher who turned herself into a senior teacher by narrating herself to others. By narrating her teaching practice and with the aid of the relationships she built during her school routine, as well as from researching her teaching formation process by sharing these narratives with a group of interlocutors, she became a teacher by choosing to express her experiences narratively, along with her many others (BAKHTIN, 2010a).

The act of narrating and the everyday life narrative

In this paper, we discuss the act of narrating and its materiality from a Bakhtinian perspective. We consider narratives as a relatively stable type of utterances - a genre of discourse - composed of thematic content, individual style, and compositional structure, always determined by the characteristics of a specific field of communication (BAKHTIN, 2010a), in this case, the field of the discourse of the daily school routine. The act of narrating and the teachers’ narratives are thus discourses of everyday life as well as their materialities.

In our understanding, both the act of narrating and the narrative "looks in two opposite directions: it looks at the objective unity of a domain of culture and at the never-repeatable uniqueness of actually lived and experienced life" (BAKHTIN, 2010b, p. 43). The pedagogical narratives reveal the unrepeatable singularities - which happen every day at school - they belong to and make up an objective unit of the cultural domain. The aspects that make up a school culture, such as curriculum issues, didactics, assessments, and the school institution, among others, are constituted and organized by the singularities that occur in everyday life. In an attempt to reveal these singularities, an expression (the act of narrating) will organize the experience (VOLÓCHINOV, 2017), the teacher's work, questioning and reorganizing the objective unit of the cultural domain, that is, the school culture.

When writing narratively about an event lived at school, the teacher makes it from an exotopic place (BAKHTIN, 2010a). At the time of writing, she occupies another space and another time where she assimilates the value, space, and time (BAKHTIN, 2018) previously lived by her, from another distance and another point of view, relating herself to the past event in a different way. This relationship with the past events is a whole other thing because the act of expressing herself gives her a surplus of vison3 (BAKHTIN, 2010a) about the narrator, about the relationships, and about the narrated event. This surplus of vision (enabled by these other values, spaces, and times aforementioned, where the teacher who narrates places herself) potentiates the construction of new memories of the future4, reorienting the teacher concerning her pedagogical practice and to the relationships she establishes in the school routine, along with her various interlocutors (SIMAS, 2018; SIMAS; PRADO; DOMINGO, 2018).

The narratives "incorporate and re-elaborate several primary (simple) genres, which were formed under the conditions of immediate discursive communication" (BAKHTIN, 2010a, p. 263, free translation). In the transformation of the primary oral genre (the one lived in schools) into a secondary written genre (the narratives), which expression presupposes an extralocation5 of the narrator, "the narrative utterances are conducive to a singular production of an unexpected or planned content (...) [since surpluses of vision are possible, and may enable] the production of new knowledge in the event of writing" (SERODIO; PRADO, 2015, p. 107, free translation).

In addition to highlighting the importance of addressing the extra-location space and time that we occupy when we are producing this kind of discursive genre, that is, the narrative, we need to reflect upon the many “others” that compose it. We start from the premise that consciousness, which is verbally constituted, is the product of the relationship between many consciences (between you and me) and acquires form and existence in the signs created by a group organized upon social relations (VOLÓCHINOV, 2017, free translation).

I become aware of myself and I only become myself by revealing myself to the other, through the other and with the help of the other. The most important acts, which constitute self-awareness, are determined by the relationship with another consciousness (with the ‘you’) (BAKHTIN, 2010a, p. 341).

Therefore, we agree with the statement made by Volóchinov (2017) that the greater the collectivity, the greater the complexity of the inner world of the self. Hence, we understand the subject as a dialogical being, who is constituted with his other through the languages, and we view the narratives from an interactive perspective: the other and the self. From the moment of my birth, it is the other the one who says who I am, and gives me a name and indicates that if I cry, I am warning that I need something, for example. Narrating and narrative, as expression and materiality built-in interactions, carry along with them many others.

Writing is always addressed to someone or a group of people, even when that interlocutor is the person who wrote the text. The narrative is full of voices, because not only the narrator writes for interlocutors, but also because when an event is narrated, it is narrated from what was interpreted of what the subjects participating in that event expressed. If the subject who narrates puts himself in a position of being responsive to others of the event, in a position of non-indifference (BAKHTIN, 2010b) concerning what happened and to people, the narrative will be composed of many voices of equal value, plenivalent voices (BAKHTIN, 2015).

The narrator who opts for this position of narrating not only what she lived, but also chooses to narrate while seeking to answer what she lived and what she understood of what others expressed, with her whole body immersed into the lived event, has her narrative amplified by the narratives of these other subjects. Narrating what she experienced, always concerning others and also responding to them, potentiates the construction of understandings and knowledge about her work (in the context of this paper), which guides the future actions of the narrator teacher concerning the daily life and others with whom she works.

The narrative inquiry expanded by the many others

To build understandings for the question "How do I become a teacher at the beginning of my teaching career?" - as well as to develop herself professionally when she started to be a teacher - the beginning teacher decided to research this initial period of her career, in a dialogue with many others, to so make her actions responsive (BAKHTIN, 2010b) to each of the children in her class.

She became a teacher-researcher6 (FREIRE, 2005; DICKEL, 2007; ZEICHNER, 2007), since "in the school routine, one is committed to the systematization of his knowledge and his knowingness, producing new relationships and mobilizing changes" (CUNHA; PRADO, 2007, p. 66, free translation).

At the beginning of her teaching career, she began to write narratives about her pedagogical practice and the relationships she established in her school life - whether with her peers, with children, with the content and/or with the rest of the school community. As mentioned earlier, in addition to writing, the teacher shared the narratives with a group of interlocutors. In this specific case of a collective follow-up, the group was composed of professionals from the field of education, namely: teachers of primary education, university teachers, coordinators and trainers of professionals in the field (all belonging to a research group from an education program of a public university) - who worked in different institutions, both public and private. The particularity of this group is the fact that they did not share the same school routine in person but had access to it only from the teacher's narratives since each person in the group worked in different institutions (most of the time, schools).

The teacher sent the narratives to the group, and the group members read them and answered them through e-mails. This movement of writing narratives about her school routine (sharing them with this group of educational professionals and establishing a dialogue on pedagogical practice) occurred during her first three years of teaching. During the development of this research, she was teaching for two classes of the second year and one first-year class, both of the elementary schools, in this chronological order, for a public school located in the interior of São Paulo State.

For the development of this research, the teacher-researcher used the narrative methodology of education research (SERODIO; PRADO, 2015). The narrative appeared to be the materiality ready to be interpreted; just as the research text (the thesis), which was written, narratively; also, as the mode of knowledge production, which was narrative as well (SIMAS, 2018).

Writing is a modeling procedure specie specifica of man, according to which the human being, using the most diverse means, putting to good use his own body or external physical means, organizes spatially and temporally his own experiences and the reality that surrounds him, giving them meanings and building diverse worlds (PONZIO, 2015, p. 23-24, free translation).

Throughout the act of narrating, the teacher organized the space and time of what she had previously experienced and, by thinking about it in the present moment, time and space, she reorganized it and envisioned new memories of the future, modeling herself and her work as a teacher. Therefore, the mode of knowledge production was narrative, whereas by narrating and researching all at once (while she was also seeking to be responsive to the other-self interaction), she was having surpluses of vision and was building new knowledge and understandings.

This research has an auto/hetero/biographical character7 (SIMAS, 2018) - if we look for the etymology of the term ‘hetero’, we find that it is a term of composition that brings the idea of another, of different. It refers to the non-similar, to the diverse -, precisely because the narratives of the other teachers amplified the research, whether they were part of the group of interlocutors, the children or her peers. All these voices appeared in the narrative of the teacher-researcher, sometimes because she brought her interpretation of the narratives of others in her text, sometimes because she wrote aiming for responding to them in the meantime. It is not about what happened inside, "but at the border between [your] consciousness and the consciousness of the other, at the threshold (...) each inner experience is at the border, they meet one another, and in this tense encounter lies all of its essence" (BAKHTIN, 2010a, p. 341, emphasis in italics by the author, free translation).

Although the research in question encompasses several aspects of the beginning of teaching topic, in this paper, we aim to interpret the interlocutory processes that took place between the teacher-researcher and this group of interlocutors, through her shared narratives.

Shared narratives in the beginning of the teaching career

What are the indexes of exchanges and indexes of the relationships of alterity, otherness, given in the language? According to Benveniste, the linguistic condition of every discourse is always given by a group of three people: me / you / him. There is always a self that enunciates and does so by addressing someone he designates as his interlocutor - the ‘you’. He speaks to this you about someone or something, that is, about ‘him’. Even when I speak of myself, I am an object of my own speech and this object, like any other object, is in the place of a ‘he’ (AMORIM, 2004, p. 97-98, with emphasis in italics by the author, free translation) .

As it is in every speech, in the teacher's narratives, there was an I, a you, and a he (she). During the process of researching her pedagogical practice narratively and with her many others, the teacher put herself in the place of the self, you, and him concomitantly. The self was manifested as the narrator of the everyday events and as the narrator of the thesis; the you made itself present when she was in the position of the interlocutor - in the group of educational interlocutors and others who were speakers in their utterances (children and the school community); and the him/her become present when the teacher spoke of her pedagogical practice and about her relationships, through the narrative writing.

We consider the quote we brought from Amorim very important. It refers to the way linguistics deals with the presence of these three people (1st, 2nd, and 3rd) in the discourse designations, to address the places that we place ourselves in the interlocutory process. However, when choosing to bring it to this paper, it is necessary to highlight that from a Bakhtinian perspective, in which we base this work, we do not speak "of" a he, but "with" a he. By bringing the voices of others in the full equality of value (BAKHTIN, 2015) within the narrative, we do not try to objectify them - although we are aware of objectifying their texts -, but rather we try to answer them, as we seek to speak "with" them and not about "them". In these movements of being you, him, and me simultaneously, it is still important to say that even when the subject is in a ‘you’ position (when one is a listener) he is not in a passive position. Every understanding of the statement is actively responsive, "it is pregnant with an answer, and in this or that form it generates it obligatorily: the listener becomes a speaker" (BAKHTIN, 2010a, p. 271).

The teacher asked not only herself (about how she became a teacher at that time), but she also asked others. As she shared her questions, her interpretations of everyday events, and of the relationships she was building, she received answers that, in turn, required an active understanding. These responses (here we chose to dwell on the responses of the group of interlocutors) showed her aspects of herself, of her relationships, and of the narrated events that she had not noticed before the interlocutions with the group. The statements of the other, in response to hers, showed her a surplus of vision (BAKHTIN, 2010a) that she had of her as a teacher and of what she narrated.

Next, we will present the movement that occurred in these interlocutions, through excerpts from narratives written by the teacher-researcher and the responses of another teacher who participated in the group. We will start with an answer from this teacher who is part of the group of interlocutors, to whom we will refer by her initials, M.F.:

They are tiny little beings and the possibilities are great! It is always good to talk a lot with them ... this way we will understand, little by little, some logics that at first sight are inconceivable! (...) There is a demand for attention that we often do not realize in the "one-to-many" dynamic, it is necessary to dig spaces and organize the "one-to-one" ... one at a time .. in some moments ... It is really difficult. But your sensitivity8 will teach us a lot, you will see! (email from M.F.).

In the email from M.F., we highlighted in bold the excerpts in which she mentions the need to act as a teacher not only when responding to the demand that comes from the collective of children, but also when responding to the needs of each of the children one by one. Guided by the principle of work shared by M.F., the beginning teacher starts to question herself concerning the work she was doing.

I am so afraid of failing them [the kids], I believe that many things can change in two months, children can learn a lot during this time, but I do not know how to enable spaces for the individual learning of each of them, M.F. had told us about the need to work/be one-to-one. How do you organize the room for this purpose if no one listens to me in there? (...) I realize they do not have the autonomy to work alone while I am helping someone. How will I be there for each one of them? I have no idea! So I also have no idea how I will achieve my goals and enhance learning for all of them... Thursday I left with the feeling that I had failed, I failed them and, worse, I left without knowing how to reverse it, not knowing how to be there for each one of them in that environment where they all scream for my attention every minute! (Excerpt from the narrative "About a Bad Day").

In the beginning teacher's narrative, we can see that the principle (shared by MF and revealed in the highlighted parts of the narrative) of being there for each child, acting in response to each one, was something she started to pursue, causing her to question herself concerning her practice. The teacher-researcher perceived, understood, and evaluated the utterance of others in the context of her experience produced in her expression (VOLÓCHINOV, 2017) towards the children, towards the interlocutors, and towards herself as a beginning teacher. These movements of perceiving, understanding, and evaluating the speech of Professor M.F., started to guide actively many moments of the speech of the beginning teacher. After all, after the moment of empathy (BAKHTIN, 2010b), in which the teacher-researcher received the statement from her colleague, she turned to herself differently, reflecting upon her work from another principle, the one that MF revealed as important to him. The exchange of texts between these two teachers made it possible an expansion to those understandings about being a teacher.

The following narratives show that the beginning teacher, instigated by this dialogue, actively responds to M.F. and the children, by taking into account not only the group but also each of the children in their singularities, when planning the class. Some themes start to appear in the teacher's narratives, such as the alternatives of working based on the needs of each child individually, what to propose for the group as a whole, and the creation of proper space and time in which the children can help each other. They are highlighted in bold in the narratives below:

All right, I got there scared to death of what could happen that day. This is what happened: they did the activities with enthusiasm. I had turned an interpretation activity into a game and they all listened and participated. They took several cards from the Portuguese binder9with grate relish. We went down to play and all of them played together and without fights, as we saw a wonderful rainbow at the end of the day (Excerpt from the narrative "But what if one day I cannot return to the place where I wanted to be?"). Yesterday, during the production of texts, I did not have to walk around the room calling them out. I sat next to Caio and then on Jefferson's side and helped them. The Lion Gang continued to create the text about what it would be like to be a robot. The ones who have difficulty with writing - who do not have a hypothesis of alphabetical writing - they received help from other peers and managed to do it. Mariah, a student who intervened with others, helped Mario in his production in such an unbelievable way, allowing him to think for himself and giving him conditions to write. At the end of this intervention, she told me: 'I'm learning to be a teacher by watching you (Excerpt from the narrative "You need to look closely).

The meeting of words between M.F. and the beginning teacher also constitute the organization of a pedagogical work, which had as a principle the importance of a work carried out not only with the collective of the class but also one that responded to the needs of each child individually. The actions narrated by the teacher were induced not only by teacher M.F. but mainly by each child in the class.

Instigated by the statement made by her colleague from the group of interlocutors, the teacher-researcher starts a movement, by expressing herself narratively, as we observed in the first part of the narrative "About a bad day". By responding to herself and the M.F., from the present time, she starts to relate in a whole other way to past events, space, and time, questioning her actions. The excerpts from the narratives "But what if one day I am unable to return to the place where I wanted to be" and "It is necessary to look carefully" reveal that these new understandings about the past enabled the teacher to reorganize her practice, proposing others ways of being and doing with children. We can see that each idea is internally dialogical "and it is open to the inspiration of others; in any case, it is not simply focused on its object, but it is accompanied by an eternal attention to another man" (BAKHTIN, 2015, p. 36, free translation).

In response to another narrative, M.F. writes again to the teacher, reiterating the principle he had previously shared:

I am sitting here doubting a little this idea that you just "got used". I am not saying that this risk does not exist! But I read your text, paying attention to a lot of things that you said, such as you managed to organize in you routine with the children (proofreading, using the book of life, correspondence, etc.). Thinking about the organization of the work (taken into account the principles that govern these practices in the dialogue with the handouts, with everything they bring together, because the handout activities are the least of the problems, right? No, it is a damn thing ...) Planning the routine considering the needs of each one is another big job and one that perhaps, now, feeling more confident ( but not at all "more accustomed") you can venture with greater agility, with a better view of the moments and the possibilities of dealing with them ... (e-mail from MF).

We can see from this interlocution that between the words of the other and the words of the one who interprets it there was a relationship of non-indifference (BAKHTIN, 2010b), "a relationship of inevitable internal interaction" (PONZIO, 2010, p. 38, free translation). Thereby, M.F. was non-indifferent to the teacher when she allowed herself a surplus of vision: she unveiled the moments when the beginning teacher showed that she had not gotten used to the school routine (as shown in the first highlight of the section). M.F. also showed that she often ends up running over the events in her narratives, making it difficult for herself to perceive the unrepeatable singularities that occur in school life. Thereafter, M.F. wrote this email in response to the excerpt from the following narrative:

Today I realized that I got used to it and the worst of all is that I thought I hadn’t. To get used to what? To the dynamics of the school? To what they do inside? To everything that they believe in or to what is right or wrong? (...) Now I realize that, from the moment I stopped being moved by each of my actions or by the actions of others, I ceased to be concerned with the scars that my actions in the school could leave in the relationships I had established or intermediated (...) I thought that when I found the loopholes that allowed me to do a job that was different from the one demanded by the school network - such as the work with the handouts and the content that is found there - I was acting in a different way from the what I really despise in the school. But by allowing students to exchange correspondences with children from another school, by providing moments of production and revision of authorial texts, by developing a project with them on a topic they are interested in, by recording relevant events in our book of life and by seeking to listen to them carefully, I was actually camouflaging what was still missing in my class and I was forgetting the things I did not agree with in the school environment (Excerpt from the narrative "Getting used to it: there also lies the danger").

Bakhtin, about to the works of Dostoevsky, says that in the dialogues of his works, "a man not only reveals himself externally but becomes, for the first time, what he is, we repeat, not only for others but also for ourselves" (BAKHTIN, 2015, p. 292-293, free translation). In the last excerpt of the narrative, the beginning teacher said she was used to the mechanical dynamics of the school routine, perhaps regretting not noticing the singularities of the events and relationships that occurred there, revealing herself and the group. However, by expressing this understanding of herself, she allowed others to interpret and respond to her actively. Thus, in his text, M.F., by contradicting her words, the words of others (VOLÓCHINOV, 2017), may have provided the teacher a new understanding of herself. Moreover, we can state that M.F. understands actively and responsively - "any act of understanding is a response, i.e., it translates what is being understood into a new context from which a response can be made" (VOLÓCHINOV, 2017, p. 179) - the narrative of the beginning teacher. By sharing his understanding that maybe the beginning teacher might not have gotten used to it, but rather she had appropriated herself more of the teaching work, M.F. allows the teacher-researcher to see herself and her work in other ways.

The aforementioned excerpts from the interlocutions between the beginning teacher and M.F. show the way these movements of construction of the teaching knowledge happened, as well as the changes that occurred in the pedagogical practice of the beginning teacher, which came from this meeting of consciences. When occupying the places of me, you, and her simultaneously, in this interlocutory movement, the beginning teacher was oriented concerning the narratives of her others (the group of interlocutors, the children, the colleagues, and also herself, as another self).

The meeting of consciences in the narrative expression

Both writing narratives about her own practice/school routine and researching narratively are expressions that organized the experience of the teacher-researcher. "It is not the experience that organizes the expression, but the other way around, the expression organizes the experience. The expression is what first gives experience its form and specificity of direction" (VOLÓCHINOV, 2017, p. 204). Through the act of writing, the subject organizes, in a certain way, the complexity of what is internal to him, his thoughts and, in this movement, when enunciating them he optimizes them, in this research, is made by the materialized narrative. When narrating, one produces a place to envision the lived events, giving them the first form and defining a direction for the social situation (the search for becoming a teacher with many others). This narrative, when reaching the other, "is subjectified in the act of responsive understanding to generate, sooner or later, a counter-statement" (VOLÓCHINOV, 2017, p. 140).

In the narrative movement, the beginning teacher sought to understand what happened in the school routine, and, based on this understanding, she reorganized, rethought, and redesigned her practice, guided by the very act of narrating. The narrative movement to build other understandings for past values, time, and space and, from them, to build memories of the future, was only possible because the others allowed several surpluses for the teacher-researcher. Therefore, the movements that occurred during the beginning of her teaching, were possible because they were not lonely, thus causing an individualist work position unfeasible (BOLÍVAR; BOLÍVAR-RUANO, 2016). The acts of narrating and researching her practice occurred in the interaction with her close interlocutors who, by understanding responsively (BAKHTIN, 2010a) the teacher's statements, wrote to her also enabling a reply. This was what happened in constant conversations, whether they were with the children, with the group of interlocutors, or with her peers.

Let us recall Volóchinov (2017), who states that the more organized and diverse the collectivity, the greater the complexity of the inner world of the self. When the experience is not about us, but the self, it tends to self-elimination, since it loses its ideological modeling and, consequently, its degree of consciousness. After all, only when "it passes through all the stages of social objectification and enters into the power system of science, art, ethics, or law, it [the consciousness] becomes a real force" (VOLÓCHINOV, 2017, p. 212).

Through the narratives that the teacher wrote at the beginning of her teaching career and through the possible dialogue that arises from the act of sharing them, her conscience was becoming a real force. Through the dialogue with many other consciences, the teacher transformed herself, her work, her others, and her pedagogical practice in school life. If the relationship between the collectivity (VOLÓCHINOV, 2017) and the consciousness is directly proportional, the more organized and diversified will be the interlocutions the teacher establishes, the more awareness about her practice is possible. Thus, the narrative was not only the component that enabled the teacher to have this space and time for reflection but also the link that enabled her dialogue with the group of interlocutors.

Throughout this movement of reflecting upon herself, the teacher was increasingly incorporating the teaching knowledge that circulated among the participants of the interlocutory process. The narratives produced from the reflection stirred by the words of the interlocutors, that is, the ones that were written after the movement of sharing narratives and receiving the answers, had another degree of elaboration, reflection, and organization - they had another quality. This is because they were composed of more voices than the previous narratives (written only from school routine). They were composed by the voices of the subjects of the school (since the teacher wrote them from the interpretation that she got from the acts of the children and the people who made up the school community), by the teacher as another version of herself and, overall, by the interlocutors of the group. Through the comments she brought in her writings, the beginning teacher revealed that she had also actively understood the statements of the professionals of this group of interlocutors.

The statement by Freire and Shor (2014), about the relationship between educator and student, also reveals what happened to the beginning teacher regarding the group of interlocutors. "The educator rebuilds his 'knowability' through the 'knowability' of students (FREIRE; SHOR, 2014, p. 161, free translation). Each time the teacher received an answer from a professional in the group, she recreated her ability to know the subjects of her educational work. When they shared the knowledge and narratives of everyday school events, their pedagogical practices in their relationship with children were changed qualitatively (BOLÍVAR; BOLÍVAR-RUANO, 2016).

Through access to the group's interpretations, the teacher increased her awareness of herself, of the relationships, and her daily work. When expanding these capacities of perceiving, understanding, and evaluating (BAKHTIN, 2010a), the unrepeatable singularities (BAKHTIN, 2010b) that happened in the school also guided her towards a more intensively pedagogical practice of the beginning teacher. The singularities experienced were perceived and observed from other spaces and times by the beginning teacher and also by many other consciences, which allowed her to have a surplus of vision (BAKHTIN, 2010a) of herself and about the work she performed. Therefore, the past events were now being assimilated in a different way from what they had been previously been. As we have already mentioned, these other ways of assimilating the past value, time, and space (BAKHTIN, 2018), from the narratives, led the teacher to reorganize her work based on the unrepeatable she noticed: the needs of the collective of children and each of them.

As in the researches that address mentoring (MARCELO, 2009; SMIT; DU TOIT, 2016) and learning communities (HARGREAVES; FULLAN, 2014; NEVE; DEVOS, 2016), here we also defend the need for collective work in the continued training of teaching in the early stages of their careers.

In this paper, however, we discuss the need for collective work in the continuing education of beginning teachers linked to the acts of narrating and sharing these narratives. This is because we perceive the power of the narrative expression (1) - when organizing the experience, assimilating the value, time and space of what had already happened, of a present time and space (in which the narrator is) - allowing the narrator to perceive surpluses of himself and of what he experienced. The sharing of narratives (2) with others is also a movement that allows for surpluses of vision and knowledge.

We believe that understanding someone's utterance is the same as orienting yourself towards it. When orienting themselves concerning the narratives, the members of the group expressed their thoughts on the teacher and her work. Whether they are the surpluses enabled by the place that the teacher-researcher placed herself when narrating (1), or the ones set off because the group of interlocutors allowed her to answer the narratives (2), these surpluses made her non-indifferent (BAKHTIN, 2010b) to the relations she was building at school. Besides, by being non-indifferent, she was taking the next step towards a response that comprised each one of her others.

1Translated by Livia Cremonez Domingos. E-mail: liviashy@gmail.com

2Since most of the teachers are women, in this paper we chose to refer to these professionals in the female gender.

3The bakhtinian concept of surplus of vision refers to the perceptions about oneself, about relationships and events, which the subjects now have access to because they have moved to a place and a time away from the situation previously experienced or because the other (from an outside place) allows this access.

4Memory of the future is a Bakhtinian concept that refers to a projection that the subject builds for his future. Memory of the future is what, in the present moment, the subject starts to glimpse as a possible future.

5Extralocation is another important concept in the Bakhtinian philosophy, it refers to a scenario where one puts himself in another place, which he did not previously occupy and, from that point, from another space and time, he gains another view and another perspective of what had already been lived in the past.

6Henceforth, we will refer to the beginning teacher also as a researcher-teacher, since we will discuss the steps of the research she carried out on her own pedagogical practice and teaching constitution.

7Guilherme do Val Toledo Prado used the concept of auto / hetero / biographical in the discipline "Narratives and dialogues: meanings and subjectivities", taught by him together with Profa. Dr. Eliane Greice D. Nogueira, on the week of September 15-19, 2014, at the Faculty of Education - UNICAMP.

8M.F writes this email in response to the narratives of two beginning teachers: the teacher to whom we refer in this research and one of her colleagues, who was also at the beginning of teaching and was part of the group of interlocutors.

9The Portuguese binder is a folder in which a teacher compiled a series of work proposals on the Portuguese language. Each child, in agreement with the teacher, chose in this file which of the proposals best met their needs. "One of the advantages of using these binders is that they allow children to progress at their own pace and, if necessary, they can skip some steps to move forward" (FREINET, 2001, p. 81, free translation).

10The childrens’ names are fictitious.

REFERENCES

AMORIM, Marília. O pesquisador e seu outro - Bakhtin nas ciências humanas. São Paulo: Musa, 2004. [ Links ]

BAKHTIN, Mikhail. Estética da criação verbal. São Paulo: WMF Martins Fontes, 2010a. [ Links ]

BAKHTIN, Mikhail. Para uma filosofia do ato responsável. São Carlos: Pedro & João Editores, 2010b. [ Links ]

BAKHTIN, Mikhail. Problemas da poética de Dostoiévski. 5. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2015. [ Links ]

BAKHTIN, Mikhail. Teoria do romance II: as formas do tempo e do cronotopo. Tradução de Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2018. [ Links ]

BOLIVAR, Antonio; BOLIVAR-RUANO, Rosel. Individualismo y comunidad profesional en los establecimientos escolares en España: limitaciones y posibilidades.Educar em Revista, Curitiba, n. 62, p. 181-198, dic. 2016. Disponível em: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104-40602016000400181&lng=es&nrm=iso. Acesso em: 14 nov. 2019. [ Links ]

BRZOSKA, Thom et al. Mentor Teacher Handbook. Portland, OR:Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, 1987. [ Links ]

CUNHA, Renata Barrichelo; PRADO, Guilherme do Val Toledo. Sobre o (Re)Conhecimento da Pesquisa do Professor: prosa e poesia. In: CUNHA, Renata Barrichelo; PRADO, Guilherme do Val Toledo. (org). Percursos de Autoria: exercícios de pesquisa. Campinas, SP: Editora Alínea, 2007. p. 47-70. [ Links ]

DICKEL, Adriana. Que sentido há em se falar em professor-pesquisador no contexto atual? Contribuições para o debate. GERALDI, Corinta Maria Grisolia, FIORENTINI, Dario; PEREIRA, Elisabete Monteiro de Aguiar (org.). Cartografias do trabalho docente. Professor(a)-pesquisador(a). Campinas: Mercado de Letras/ALB, 2007. p. 33-71. [ Links ]

FREINET, Célestin. Para uma escola do povo: guia prático para a organização material. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2001. [ Links ]

FREIRE, Paulo. Pedagogia do oprimido. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 2005. [ Links ]

FREIRE, Paulo; SHOR, Ira. Miedo y osadía: la cotidianidad del docente que se arriesga a practicar una pedagogía transformadora. Buenos Aires, AR: Siglo XXI Editores Argentina, 2014. [ Links ]

HARGREAVES, Andy. Profesorado, cultura y postmodernidad. Madrid: Morata, 1996. [ Links ]

HARGREAVES, Andy; FULLAN, Michael. Capital profesional. Madrid: Morata , 2014. [ Links ]

HUBERMAN, Michael. O ciclo de vida profissional dos professores. In: Nóvoa, António (ed). Vidas de professores. Porto: Porto Editora, 2007. p. 31-61. [ Links ]

INGERSOLL, Richard; SMITH, Thomas. The wrong solution to the teacher shortage. Educational Leadership, [s.l.], v. 60, n. 8, 2003. p. 30-33. [ Links ]

MARCELO, Carlos. Empezar con buen pie: inserción a la enseñanza para profesores principiantes. Olhar de Professor , Ponta Grossa, n. 33, p. 27-38, 2007. [ Links ]

MARCELO, Carlos. Políticas de inserción a la docencia: de eslabón perdido a puente para el desarrollo profesional docente. In: Marcelo, Carlos (ed.). El profesorado iniciante - inserción a la docencia. Barcelona: OCTAEDRO, 2009. p. 07-58. [ Links ]

NEVES, Debbie; DEVOS, Geert. How do professional learning communities aid and hamper professional learning of beginning teachers related to differentiated instruction? Teachers and Teaching, Belgium, v. 23, n. 3, p. 262-283, 2016. [ Links ]

PONZIO, Augusto. Procurando uma palavra outra. São Carlos: Pedro & João Editores , 2010. [ Links ]

PONZIO, Augusto. A escrita antes da fala e a escrita literária. Prolegômenos ao ensino da língua. In: PRADO, Guilherme do Val Toledo et al. (org.). Metodologia narrativa de pesquisa em educação: uma perspectiva bakhtiniana. São Carlos: Pedro & João Editores , 2015. p. 23-35. [ Links ]

SERODIO, Liana Arrais; PRADO, Guilherme do Val Toledo. Metodologia narrativa de pesquisa em educação na perspectiva do gênero do discurso. In: PRADO, Guilherme do Val Toledo et al. (org.). Metodologia narrativa de pesquisa em educação: uma perspectiva bakhtiniana . São Carlos: Pedro & João Editores , 2015. p. 91-127. [ Links ]

SIMAS, Vanessa França. A professora-pesquisadora-iniciante e seus outros: caminhos partilhados na invenção de ser professora. Tese (Doutorado em educação) - Faculdade de Educação, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, 2018. [ Links ]

SIMAS, Vanessa França; PRADO, Guilherme do Val Toledo; DOMINGO, Jesús. Dimensões de consciência possíveis na pesquisa e na escrita narrativa sobre si - uma perspectiva bakhtiniana.Bakhtiniana, Rev. Estud. Discurso, São Paulo, v. 13, n. 1, p. 113-131, abr. 2018. Disponível em: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2176-45732018000100113&lng=pt&nrm=iso. Acesso em: 12 jul. 2020. [ Links ]

SMIT, Tanya; DU TOIT, Pieter H. Transforming beginner teacher mentoring interventions for social reform. South African Journal of Education, Pretoria, v. 36, n. 3, p. 1-12, 2016 . Disponível em: http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0256-01002016000300005&lng=en&nrm=iso. Acesso em: 10 mar. 2019. [ Links ]

TARDIF, Maurice. Saberes docentes e formação profissional. Petrópolis, RJ: Vozes, 2010. [ Links ]

VOLÓCHINOV, Valentin. Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem: problemas fundamentais do método sociológico na ciência da linguagem. São Paulo: Editora 34 , 2017. [ Links ]

ZEICHNER, Kenneth M. Para além da divisão entre professor-pesquisador e pesquisador acadêmico. In: GERALDI, Corinta Maria Grisolia; FIORENTINI, Dario; PEREIRA, Elisabete Monteiro de Aguiar (org.). Cartografias do trabalho docente. Professor(a)-pesquisador(a) . Campinas: Mercado de Letras/ALB , 2007. p. 207-236. [ Links ]

Received: August 03, 2020; Accepted: October 09, 2020

Creative Commons License Este é um artigo publicado em acesso aberto (Open Access) sob a licença Creative Commons Attribution, que permite uso, distribuição e reprodução em qualquer meio, sem restrições desde que o trabalho original seja corretamente citado.