Variations in exchange rates and new configurations of the competition space for the formation of teachers in Brazil

The formative model associated to the normal modality, which was being devalued within the Brazilian educational field at that moment, was historically configured through special relations established between State authorities and the teaching community ( ^{SARTI, 2012} ). In its inception, this model was characterized by a “social conservatism” ( ^{LANG, 1996} , p. 9), since teachers acted in the name of the State to disseminate alongside school knowledges the moral qualities related to certain ways of acting, thinking and feeling ( ^{TANURI, 2000} ). With the affirmation of that model, the presence of primary teachers among the educators in Normal Schools became ever more common. They took on an increasing preeminence in establishing the good pedagogical practices that should be learned by the future teachers in order to be put in practice (and therefore perpetuated) in their future teaching actions. Such craft-based formative model ( ^{LANG, 1996} ) played an important role in demarcating the teaching profession as a specific office that went beyond its vocational tradition and brought to teachers the confidence, the recognition and the delegation of authority by the State ( ^{TARDIF, 2013} ).

Within that model anchored in practice and in imitation, pedagogy was “understood as the ‘art of teaching’ and the method could not be separated in practice from the arts of the doing ” ( ^{CARVALHO, 2000} , p. 113, emphasis in the original), with the teaching expertise incarnated by teachers recognized as exemplary. The learning by teachers was, therefore, conducted through observation, through the establishment of intergenerational relationships, and took place in the Model School, next to the Normal School. Marta ^{Carvalho (2000)} explains that such model of formation was structured under the primacy of visibility, which required understanding exemplary practices with the comprehension of the principles that guided them, in order to apply them creatively. It was a time when teaching was perceived as a practical art, in the expression of Israel ^{Scheffler (1974)} , and formation took on an intrareferenced character ( ^{BOURDONCLE, 2000} ) related to an occupation that was carried out in loco and by the formation agents themselves.

Drawing from that formative model, the teaching profession and its culture assumed its own place in the formation of teachers. According to the perspective proposed by Michel de ^{Certeau (1994)} , it is from a place circumscribed as his own that subjects – of will and power – conduct the management (strategic, therefore) of their relations to a distinct exteriority to, then, capitalize on earnings, prepare expansions and ensure their independence in the face of circumstances.

However, at the transition between the 19th to the 20th century, the craft-based model of primary teacher formation suffered a first blow with the emergence of the scientific pedagogy, according to which scientifically sanctioned knowledges began to appear as the foundations for the teaching practice, whilst processes of autonomization of the teaching methods were taking place ( ^{CARVALHO, 2000} ). Under the new emerging perspective, learning to teach was no longer equivalent to the learning of teaching models, and began to be associated to the learning of knowledges to be applied in the situations of teaching. This new pedagogy, no longer seen as an art, but rather as applied science, ceased to be a subject concerning the primary teachers themselves, since the more legitimate knowledges related to teaching were to be produced externally to the teaching profession. The Model school became the School of Application; and the teacher, formerly a practitioner of the art of teaching, would experience a gradual increase of the technical dimension of his/her work, now reduced to an instrumental level.

According to the Organic Law of Normal Education ( ^{BRASIL, 1946} ), higher education was to be required of teachers of the Normal School. The formation of primary teachers was then transferred to pedagogues (education experts) and to secondary education teachers. The primary teachers themselves, educated in the Normal School, would no longer be the educators of the new generations that would succeed them in the teaching profession. Thus, they lost a position of their own ( ^{CERTEAU, 1994} ) formerly achieved in this formation, and would then appear as passive references for the work of other agents who, at that moment, possessed a capital that was valued in the field, under the aegis of the scientific pedagogy. They faced, therefore, a situation of symbolic weakening of their knowledges and practices.

Nevertheless, within that same context of the emergence of scientific pedagogy, the game for teacher education continued to be played by agents associated to school education. Agents who, armed with capitals collected thanks to their incursion into higher education, were strengthened – as experts – to assume their own place within that game. Although being experts formed under the model of the cultivated man ( ^{BOURDONCLE, 1990} ), pedagogues (many of them former primary teachers) and teachers of secondary education were, from the occupational point of view, associated to the school space and culture, as well as to the teaching occupation and profession. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, those agents took their place in the formation of primary teachers, insuring its intrareferenced character ( ^{BOURDONCLE, 2007} ).

The position of these teachers within the field became, however, more and more vulnerable with the “loss of character of the normal school” ( ^{SAVIANI, 2005} ) effected by the policies implemented during the military regime, which culminated with the creation of the Teaching Specific Capacitation (HEM) in 1971. The teachers that worked in the formation of primary teachers faced then a steady and rather significant weakening of their position in the field, with the devaluation of their space of action – reduced to “one capacitation among many others” ( ^{SAVIANI, 2005} , p. 5) – and with the precarization of their material conditions for work and formation ( ^{CENAFOR, 1986} ).

This situation, marked by the loss of character of the normal formative model and by the loss of value of the capital accumulated by the more traditional agents in the field, favored the emergence in the late 1980s of new configurations for the disputes around the formation of Brazilian teachers working in the first years. It was then that, as mentioned above, new agents – associated to higher education and to the scientific-academic community – began to be more actively involved in such disputes and to employ their capitals to achieve more central positions in the game. And the discourses that acquired legitimacy at the time, although opposing each other in many aspects, coincided in at least one point: the delegitimization of the existing formative model.

The Brazilian game for the education of primary teachers would then take on new configurations. From a place proper to the teaching profession, it would move towards a different one ( ^{CERTEAU, 1994} , p. 46). The other one, in this case, was the scientific-educational community which, according to ^{Nóvoa (1999)} , experienced during that period a strong international development of its sphere of influence.

The debate circumscribing the formation of these teachers in Brazil as something proper of the scientific-educational community was, as mentioned above, a vigorous one. For certain groups, the University should be the locus of the teacher education proper which could thereby be raised to the model of the cultivated man ( ^{BOURDONCLE, 1990} ), characterized by an academic perspective that would imply a centrality of cognitive-cultural contents to the detriment of the didactic-pedagogical aspects prioritized in the previous model. For other groups associated to the same community, teacher education should not necessarily take place within the university, as long as it was supported by scientific-academic knowledges about teaching, about learning and other aspects that would produce an approximation of the teaching practice and routine to more sophisticated levels from an epistemological point of view.

A new configuration therefore emerged in the Brazilian space for teacher education in which universities, research institutes and other agents associated to the academic space and to higher education formed closer ties to the State authorities regarding the formation of teachers for the first years5. In view of the negation of the former model of teacher education, in which the teaching profession had its own place, the education experts acquired “the monopoly of authority ( ^{BOURDIEU, 2003} ) and of competence to establish what teachers should know, how they should act professionally, where, how and by whom they should be formed” ( ^{SARTI, 2012} , p. 332).

Because of that, and taking on an extrareferenced character – dealing with an occupation that is carried out and governed outside the formative space ( ^{BOURDONCLE, 2007} ) –, but lacking a proper place for teachers of basic education, the formation of teachers for the first years seemed to have experienced its autonomization6, drifting away from the culture of the teaching profession and occupation. From the institutional point of view, basic teaching now occupied a marginal position in this process, as a passive reference for the other competing agents. Its existence continued to justify the disputes in question ( ^{SARTI, 2012} ), without relying on symbolic capital (in the form of a systematized corpus of knowledges associated to teaching and the teacher education) that would allow the emergence, from within, of a group capable of carving for itself a place inside that new configuration of the competition space for the formation of teachers. It is to be supposed that from that moment on Brazilian teachers working in the first years of education no longer had a proper place in the formation of the new generations of teachers, and moved to a no-place ( ^{CERTEAU, 1994} , p. 100) devoid of power, from which they could only “play in the terrain imposed to them such as it is organized by the law of an alien force”. All that was left to them was the place of the dead ( ^{NÓVOA, 1999} ), from which they now acted as mere consumers of a formation produced outside their occupational group ( ^{SARTI, 2012} ). Without a proper place in this formation, teachers experienced the effacement of the teaching occupation and its culture within this game. Their symbolic capitals, conquered in previous disputes in which they played a part, were now vanishing, losing value, becoming insignificancies. Such sociocultural effacement suffered by the teaching profession brought important impacts on the formative structure to be developed for teachers that worked in the first years of basic education. That is what is discussed next.

Universitarization by institutional transfer, autonomization and deprofessionalisation of teacher education

In view of what was argued above, we can consider that the Brazilian movement to raise the formation of primary and early childhood education teachers to higher education resulted in a sui generis universitarization conducted to a large extent by non-university institutions and implemented through an atypical process of institutional transfer ( déplacement , according to BUTLEN, 2006) that did not consider the pre-existing formative structures and did not absorb them, as is more commonly the case in universitarization processes, in fact orienting itself towards an effacement of the presence of the teaching profession and its culture within this space. This process of sociocultural effacement has been observed, for example, in the curricula of many pedagogy courses, which pointed to a “formation of a more abstract character and little integrated into the concrete context in which the teacher-professional will work” ( ^{GATTI; NUNES, 2009} , p. 55), with the “absence of relationships with knowledges coming from the world of teaching practice and basic education” ( ^{GATTI, 2012} , p. 158).

Nevertheless, such process collides head-on with the objectives of professionalisation that have been guiding the discourses and legal texts related to the formation of teachers, and which have become more emphatic among us during the last years (CNE/CP 2/2015). The clash occurs because the raising of an occupation to the level of a profession presupposes, among other factors, the professionalisation of its formative processes, which should then

[…] guide themselves more strongly towards the professional activity, with regard to its programs (which are now expressed in terms of competences), its pedagogy (apprenticeships, alternation), its specific methods (case studies, simulations, practical analysis, problem solving) and its stronger ties to the professional space (from which a large part of its educators will come). ( ^{BOURDONCLE, 2000} , p. 118, our translation, our emphasis).

Thus, among other aspects, to professionalize an occupation requires attributing to practitioners an active role in the formation of new generations of professionals, so as to allow students to construct an identity associated to the profession to which they are being formed. It is, therefore, a formation that requires the use of devices that bring together the university student and his/her work, its agents and the reference professional culture. Professional formation is defined, in these terms, as a socialization process ( ^{SOREL, 2005} ).

However, contrary to such perspective, the universitarization of the formation of Brazilian teachers to engage in the first years of education was marked by processes of autonomization, with significant losses regarding its socializing potential, producing – as it seems possible to infer – its deprofessionalisation. Such universitarization was not aligned, as is usually presupposed ( ^{BOURDONCLE, 2000} , ²⁰⁰⁷ ), to the movement of professionalisation of the teaching profession, understood as a process that involves, among other factors, an increase in the control that the members of the occupation in question exercise over the work they conduct ( ^{FREIDSON, 1998} ), among which the formation of the future generations is located. In an ideal typical model, the professionals

[…] with total capacity to control their own work are organized in associations, independent both from the State and from capital, and organize and manage the practice of a body of knowledge and competence or jurisdiction unequivocally demarcated and monopolized by its members. These associations determine the qualifications and the number of those that should be trained for the practice, the substance of this training, the requisites for the satisfactory conclusion of the training, and the admission in the practice and the terms, conditions and goals of the practice itself. ( ^{FREIDSON, 1998} , p. 68, our emphasis).

The members of an occupation recognized in its professional statute assume, under this perspective, a place of their own, which gives them the strategic control of their work and of the social representations connected to their group.

It is important to clarify, however, that this ideal model of professionalism, marked by a monopoly of authority ( ^{BOURDIEU, 2003} ), has been challenged by a crisis that affects the prestige of professions, then questioned regarding the value of their knowledges, formation, ethics and degree of reliability ( ^{TARDIF, 2006} ). So, it seems reasonable to consider that the search for a professionalisation of teaching should not go through the conquest of such monopoly on the part of teachers, which would not be likely to contribute to overcome this instrumental perspective that has been characterizing the debate about school and its challenges for some time now.

It is not, therefore, the case of adopting as a goal the North American myth of teaching professionalisation ( ^{TARDIF, 2013} ), according to which educational problems could be solved through the production of the professional teacher ( ^{POPKEWITZ; NÓVOA, 2001} ). It is rather a case of searching for alternative meanings for the process of professionalisation of the teaching occupation, more in tune with the ethical and political dimension of teaching, and that promote a real social rescue of the teaching profession ( ^{NÓVOA, 1999} , p. 17-18), allowing teachers to achieve more central positions in the educational field, from which they could assume greater control of their work and formation. A movement that allows them to “raise their professionalism against the forces of restructuring” ( ^{GOODSON; HARGREAVES, 2008} , p. 210), re-appropriating the “projects of professionalisation at the level of professional practices” ( ^{GOODSON; HARGREAVES, 2008} , p. 213).

We understand that this re-demarcation of the teaching practice as proper to the teachers is part of a wider movement of strengthening of the teachers’ position in the educational field – involving social, political and epistemological dimensions – that would allow them to assume a strategic place of will and power within the space of competition for education, from where they could “capitalize on achieved advantages, prepare future expansions and thereby obtain for themselves an independence with respect to the variability of circumstances” ( ^{CERTEAU, 1994} , p. 99).

Differently from what occurred in the case explored here, with regard to the formation of teachers that work in the first years, this strengthening of the teaching profession within the educational and formation field can be compatible with a project of universitarization, as long as the latter is capable of facing the challenge of “constructing a true professional formation” for teachers ( ^{PERRENOUD, 1993} , p. 73). However, and despite the anxiety we have cultivated during the last 30 years in this country around the formation of teachers as a panacea for our grave difficulties regarding school education, the production of a true professional formation for teachers will have two await the result – even partial, as it is usually the case in the social fields – of disputes that are prior to it and that refer to the demarcation of what we understand by professional formation and by teaching.

The search for a consensus, in the sense given to it by ^{Bourdieu (2003)} , around such definitions was at play in the case explored here – that of the universitarization of the formation of Brazilian teachers working in the first years of basic education – and is still taking place within the competition space generated around teacher education. The result of the dispute conducted in previous years produced a universitarization that, differently from what was expected, did not offer teachers the valuation announced by legislation. On the contrary, as if by a perverse effect ( ^{BOUDON, 1977} ), the universitarization of the formation of our primary teachers produced a socially devalued formation ( ^{NOGUEIRA; PEREIRA, 2010} ), as discussed here, deprofessionalized and of low socializing potential, particularly as a result of the sociocultural effacement imposed to the teaching profession.

Regarding the University, the attempt to offer those teachers a formation through the pedagogy course spared it from the challenge of absorbing the pre-existing formative structure in order to, under the given material conditions, transform it to (hopefully) produce new possibilities of formation. As we attempted to demonstrate here, in a context marked by considerable symbolic fragility of teachers of the first years, the path to raise the level of their professional formation was legitimized within disputes that were largely external to them, established among others, more specifically among agents connected to the scientific-academic community and to higher education which, at that moment, already possessed specific capitals to assume the formation of teachers of basic education as their own. This process, marked by grave imprecisions, resulted in an uncommon, timid universitarization which, we must recognize, has been showing itself incapable of impacting more significantly the formative work developed by the University.