What the research data on elementary school teachers in the region reveal

The educational realities of the microregion of Ouro Preto point the following issues: 1. The difficulties and necessities of the target population, who have sought in other Higher Education institutions, and not the UFOP, studies and advisories to solve the issues of the region; 2. The need to contribute, while university, with the training of the professional of education in all teaching levels; 3. The importance of basic education and the need to overcome the causes of school failure; 4. The strengthening of research in the educational field that will benefit all the existing degrees in the UFOP; 5. The formation of a teacher researcher in the ways of humanizing educational practices that begin to analyze and actively incorporate the products of the reflective process; 6. The formation of a teacher researcher with possibility of pedagogical intervention in the social practices outside the school and who knows, for this purpose, how to analyze the historical and social conditions of each context, integrating in the collective questions of humanity. In addition to being a reader and consumer of culture, they should be able to work within the principles of the participatory planning, as well as to lead and manage educational projects and processes; 7. The training of a professional in the area of education, mediator of knowledge in the teaching-learning process, who seeks to develop a relation with knowledge as a subject.

Considering these questions that emerge from the educational demands of the region, we felt the need to synthesize the data on the reality of the teachers of the Inconfidentes Region. The referred data were organized from three axes: profile, training trajectory, career trajectory and teacher malaise.

In order to know who the teachers of the Inconfidentes Region are, 600 questionnaires were distributed, with 33% return, totaling 200 collaborators. The questions addressed the socioeconomic and cultural profile, in addition to the formation and career trajectory. We found that 97% of the teachers are women and 66% are married. Of these, 82% are in the age group of 30-49 years. Most, 43%, declared themselves brown. On the socioeconomic data, the incomes of the teachers of the region show that the subjects (25%) receive two to three minimum wages, and 21% earn from three to four minimum wages per person in their household. We verified in the research that 76% of the teachers work in the elementary school and 15% in early childhood education.

From these general data, the teaching profile in the region, in relation to sex, agrees with the data from other researches on the feminization of the teaching profession. The research conducted by ^{Oliveira and Vieira (2010}) shows that, in Minas Gerais, 86% of the teachers are women. According to ^{Gatti & Barreto (2009}), women are responsible for 77% of the jobs in education, considering all the levels of education, although the proportion between men and women changes according to the schooling level of the teachers and the level of education in which they perform. Women have a greater prevalence in early childhood education and lower prevalence in high school (^{Gatti & Barreto, 2009}).

Regarding the age group of most female teachers, it was observed that they are in a period in which teachers are entering the so-called intermediate phase of their career, according to ^{Huberman (1995}). Moreover, in this age group there is, predominantly, a worsening of the physical and mental health conditions of women (^{Diniz, 2001}).

Regarding race, the data shown point to the racial non-identification, since 43% declares themselves brown in a context historically marked by afro-descendance, in which the slavery past of Ouro Preto and other cities of the region have an impact on the composition of the color/race of the population, although only 15% declare themselves black.

The socioeconomic data indicates the same trend mentioned in other researches (^{Oliveira & Vieira, 2010}) that state that most educators are in the salary range of up to three minimum wages.

In relation to the training trajectory, it was verified that most of the teachers in the Inconfidentes Region completed elementary school in the public network (72%). The initial formation in higher education is balanced between the public (43%) and private (42%) network, and most studied Pedagogy.

Although it is consensus in literature that students from public schools constitute the group that occupies most of the seats of private universities, the results from the research point to the access of these teachers to the public institutions in the region, especially the UFOP.

We have noticed that, over the last years, the number of teachers with postgraduate degree has grown in Brazil. ^{Gatti and Barreto (2009}) point to the growth of the quantity of teachers that resort to varied courses, whether a face-to-face or a distance course, or both. In this research, we confirmed the national tendency: 60% of the educators have a postgraduate degree, and the most sought-after course (49%) was Psychopedagogy. We also verified that most of them graduated in distance courses.

Regarding the time they had practiced teaching, we observed that, generally, the average time in which the studied subjects had worked with Education is from 16 to 20 years, representing 29% of the total. To ^{Huberman (1995}), the moment that these educators are in their career shows a passage between the stabilization phase to an experimentation stage regarding their professional path, reflection on the uncertainties and the possible changes in their professional trajectory.

In this research, we sought to know the institutions that offered actions of continuing teacher education. Our observation is that most of these actions is still offered by the Municipal Departments of Education; we also identified that the number of teachers who participate of training actions organized by universities is quite small, confirming a certain distance between initial and continuing education, therefore, between university and school.

On teacher malaise, we used the Conversation methodology, which guided us in the analysis qualitatively. We listened to the statements that referred to the insistence and repetition of a generalized impotence of female teachers, which caused us to return to the gender category in its interface with the feminine.

Almost all the statements point to the difficulty in dealing with the student, with situations that are not recurrent, that are ‘abnormal’ within the sociocultural logic preestablished by the school. But the emphasis in the teachers’ speeches was due to what concerns the feminine, which, in turn, affects the body of the female teachers. Based on the writings of ^{Lacan (1992}a), thinking as ^{Miller (2003}), it was possible to reflect on these dilemmas. An understanding and intervention possibility of this and in this feminine that appears, hiding in the dissatisfaction that sickens and hampers female teachers in an attempt to erase the differences. We could think that such difficulties with differences go through difficulties with the difference of being a woman.

On the question proposed here regarding the feminine, in the psychoanalytical field, there is a difference between the feminine and the gender issue. From the point of view of the unconscious, ^{Kehl (1996}) says that the difference is minimal and depends on the inscription mode of the subjects, men and women, under the phallic order that organizes desire. Femininity and masculinity are distributed between men and women in different combinations, pointing the author to a sexuality that is of each individual. There is, ^{Birman (2002}) states, a psychical body that subverts the anatomical body. Psychoanalysis thinks sexuality as construction, a possibility to become a man or woman, consequence if a process of psychical elaboration from the complex of castration and the confrontation with culture.

At the same time, we should consider the ideas circulating around gender diversity, and it is important to mention the contributions of ^{Butler (1998}) from her gender (de)construction on the subversion of identity, and of ^{Louro (2001}), with her words that announce the Queer Theory and its effect on education. The author discusses the differences from a peculiar look, thinking beyond the subjectivity and from the social aspects that are dormant, in the understanding of the difference beyond diversity and its dilemmas. She indicates possible outputs when we think of the teaching practice and also of training, questioning the ineffectiveness of the current training models.

The intervention-research, in the study on the teacher malaise axis, adopted the device of conversation, based on the works by Freud and Lacan and on poststructuralist perspectives, in an approach that considers the division of the female teacher by desire, making her the subject within a social context. Opposed to universalization, psychoanalysis goes toward the singular position of a subject that is not only spoken of, but that can also speak.

^{Miranda (2010}) conceives the Conversation as an extension of the ‘free association’ method by Freud, a fundamental technique of psychoanalysis. What one says, in a group, may touch the other and generate unprecedented perspectives. The construction of new knowledge, Miranda states, is what gives to the Conversation the possibility to intervene and cause changes, in addition to allowing material for analysis to be collected there. Speaking, ^{Miller states (2002}), implies opening the possibility of circumscribing the experience from what affects and not from what the other expects. To ^{Miller (2003}), what matters is not what the subject can say about themselves, in the sense that they give to their acts and desires, but what escapes them and is shown in the stumbling of their speech, in the ‘hiance’ between what is said and what is meant.

Professionals who lead conversations do not need to be psychoanalysts, they may have any profession, however, it is necessary that they are going through the ‘word experience’, someone who experienced and is sensible to the disagreement between what they say - enunciated - and what is meant (or what is said unintentionally) - enunciation. It is not enough to be someone well informed or benevolent, that ‘gives the floor’ to children and adolescents, or to teachers, but to support the points of non-knowing, of suspension or failure in the speech of those who come to the conversation.

In this proposal to listen female teachers, Conversations and narratives of life history, one connected to the other, since the Conversation, when it questions the teacher on her malaise in light of teaching, can disagree with the questions that refer to that which is proposed by the method of narratives. It is important to note that, in this way, they meet as a new possibility to listen from a perspective of the implication in the educational act and not of blaming, considering the subject, the subject of the unconscious. ^{Diniz (2005}) speaks of the possibility, from the psychoanalytical listening inserted in research/intervention, of penetrating in concrete and hidden things through elements little noticed or unnoticed, working with evidence and the so-called ‘blind zones’ also in the teacher training processes.

And what to do with the lack of space verified in schools to discuss, reflect and work subjectivity? How to consider going beyond theoretical knowledge and to think pedagogical proposals, considering the division of the involved subjects? Would it be possible to train educators to deal with the liquidity of the teaching and learning process? Would it be possible to teach without the subject being lost in the cement of the social and school floor? There is in us the insistent concern to think the teachers not only as reflective, multipliers, but as mobilizers - of themselves, of others, of a process - with less paralysis and more mobilization of these subjects of social, historical, affective and also unconscious peculiarities. These were the reflections that we conducted in other encounters of conversation with female teachers from the Inconfidentes Region.

In Conversations, the bet is done in the possible displacement of the speeches of female teachers, by the bias of the feminine that emerges in education, thinking, in particular, of possible mechanisms to be invested, constructed and sought by themselves, in a way that female teachers can reposition in their practice, in their subjectivity, as well as in light of the differences that their students have. A positioning capable of reflecting on the teacher and learning process and on their professional teacher development (PTD), which may even soften complaints related to the low levels of education and to the teacher malaise. However, we must not forget that there is always a point in which the subject finds no answer both in their relationship with knowledge and in their lives, and, perhaps, the path of invention is necessary (^{Diniz, 2005}).

The research in the Observatório de Educação Básica (OBEDUC - Elementary Education Observatory): between theory and practice

This item shows some statements of teachers who have gone through a process of theoretical formation combined with the permanent discussion of their pedagogical practices, in order to make known, with narratives, the relations established collaboratively between university and public elementary school.

The subjects involved in the research revealed, in different ways, how their continuing education process within the project has been constituted. All indicate that the meeting with research and their respective performance in a research in which they land their experiences and teaching practices in the theoretical material and of the empiricism in which they are working, constitutes a privileged locus of formation. We will analyze some fragments of the narratives:

Continuing teacher education is necessary for every teacher. Participating in the Observatory of Education - OBEDUC is my second opportunity to discuss education in Brazil, the initial and continuing teacher education and their professional development. The importance of knowing one of the educational public policies aimed at the initial teacher education, the Programa Institucional de Bolsas de Iniciação à Docência (PIBID - Institutional Program for Teaching Initiation Scholarships), studying it renews my feelings and my fighting spirit in favor of equal and fair education for all, but without losing the awareness that another generation will harvest this transformation. After almost 20 years dedicated to teaching with a specialization course in Mathematics Education, I feel privileged to be part of the OBEDUC group, since the Observatory of Education provides us with readings, intense discussions, production of texts, debates and seminars on initial and continuing teacher education. Heated discussions reveal the anguishes and setbacks of teaching. Given this context, we see ourselves in the place of beginner teachers, just as at the beginning of our careers, when we didn’t know how to act in the classroom, we perceive ourselves with the desire to be researchers, to continue our education. We look at our classrooms with the desire to transform them in real locus of the long-dreamed quality education (Beth, 2015, OBEDUC/UFOP).

Beth, a mathematics teacher, although she has participated in several courses in her professional life, even graduate courses, highlights that the research experience made her resize her gaze on the work she performs in the classroom. And this experience, sometimes, placed her in a place of a beginner teacher, that is, in the discovery of new directions for her professional development.

Another colleague, Mitiko, who collaborates with the research, also a mathematics teacher in the municipal network of Mariana, narrates her entry in research and indicated the continuing education process in a unique way. In fact, this is not an event in this research, but what we want to emphasize is continuing education through research in projects of collaboration between university and elementary education, as is happening in the Observatory of Education Program/CAPES.

It was almost a year ago that I went through a selective process for collaborating process in the project Professional Teaching Development and Pedagogical Innovation - an exploratory study on the PIBID contributions supported by the Education Observatory Program - OBEDUC. It was inserted in a completely different project, something new to me, a challenge. It’s not just about seeking a project, the expectations are different now, the posture, the experience and the behavior after years of teaching would do me good. Well, I won’t deny, but the first meeting didn’t comprise anything. But, as the meeting went on, the reading of books of training teachers, and the awareness of the action and practice were the beginning of the elucidation of the dimension of the project. ‘The seminars are the strength of the project, the readings of theses, texts on the teaching profession are, at any time, triggered in a range of knowledge on the practice as a teacher that evidences the variety of theoretical deepening in the profession’ (Mitiko, 2015, OBEDUC/UFOP).

Teacher Joel, also a teacher in the field of mathematics teaching, reports that, in the midst of so many experiences of continuing education, the participation as researcher has become a watershed in his performance in teaching and as mathematics ‘educator’. Joel has been a teacher since he was an undergraduate student in Engineering in Minas Gerais, in the early 1980s, teaching mathematics in the state education network as an authorized teacher. He is a professor at the end of his career, but who, after having a contact with research, redefines his practice and his professional development as unique within the project.

Joining the OBEDUC gave me a very great expectation, I realized that I was an extremely practical teacher, but with little theoretical basis regarding educational studies. It was scary because I, who always mastered the classroom practice, suddenly was completely unprotected in front of a new knowledge, brought by reading and studying texts focused on continuing education and professional development. At first, when I saw the doctorates, masters and researcher students, I felt empty, but when they opened discussions where I could speak, I was comfortable. As Paulo Freire says, “There is no knowing more, nor knowing less, there are different knowledges” (1987, p. 68). I start to understand that, despite having the practice, it’s with theory that you’ll advance in knowledge. It gives you support, reason, confidence and even the right to disagree (Joel, 2015, OBEDUC/UFOP).

And he finishes demonstrating how the experience with research led him to resize his practice from the theory/practice binomial. That is, it indicates that research modifies the teaching practice, even if it does not have any flavor of ‘Innovation’, it is a resizing of a practice already experienced and, therefore, a transformation in the development of the pedagogical doing and of the continuing education for teaching.

The experience in the OBEDUC made me see that I need to know this other side, the academic, theoretical side, and that it is necessary to know how to ground our arguments in order to be heard. My practice, at first, is only mine, but in order to pass it on and share it, I need to write it, to theoretically ground it, because, alone, it is empty. Discussions in the OBEDUC make me think that the PIBID proposal should work continuously. It shouldn’t be only a project in which only some participate, it should be for all students, inserted in the licentiate course program. My participation in this research materialized a thought that I had for a long time, that I don’t want to be a mathematician, I always sought to become a mathematics educator. I have no doubt that this experience will help me, in the future, to be able to obtain a master’s degree in mathematics education (Joel, 2015, OBEDUC/UFOP).

The analysis from the statement by Valdete, from Humanities, licentiate in the Letters course, active in the municipal network of Mariana, MG, help us to understand the place of research in elementary education. Valdete, an experienced teacher, according to ^{Huberman’s classification (1995}) on career cycles, is also at the end of her trajectory as a teacher:

Over the years, more experienced in the teaching practice, I started to understand that my professional development was attached to my continued education, and that both happened in the relationships I established with my colleagues, with the students in the classroom, in the way I planned the classes and in so many other moments that I experience. After joining the OBEDUC program, in the research ‘Professional Teaching Development and Pedagogical Innovation: exploratory on PIBID contributions’ as collaborator, I have experienced, along with fellow elementary education teachers, the rich opportunity to develop reflective processes, either through the intense reading we performed, or through our participation in seminars, forums, congresses, among other formative moments in which we discuss the thematic proposed in the research. Until then, the possibility to be placed on the same level with undergraduates, graduates, doctorates and fellow elementary education teachers, to discuss such relevant issues on teacher training seemed distant. My way of thinking, being, acting and reacting was reviewed and rethought in this training process, many knowledges were added, other clarified and many others revisited. The appropriation of knowledge and the reflective processes have been instrumental in this process of my teaching career. Today I can understand more clearly the stages I’ve been, and still am going through (Valdete, 2015, OBEDUC/UFOP).

It is based on these assumptions that we emphasize the relevance of the teacher to reflect and re-signify their practice. However, we also understand that the reflective procedure is something subjective and that depends on a professional maturity, since “[…] nobody trains nobody, and training is, inevitably, a work of reflection on the pathways of life (^{Nóvoa & Finger, 1988}, p. 116).

Throughout my teaching career, I’ve participated in many seminars, lectures, courses and other events aimed at education. I’ve acquired some of these experiences on my own will, and others were offered by education networks. Many of these courses, throughout my career, contributed little or not at all to my professional formation, since they didn’t provide a critical reflexivity, which allowed the ‘permanent (re)construction of a personal and professional identity’, as Candau (1996) points out. Of course that, only at this point of my teaching career, I am clear about the fragility of this pseudo-formation that has been provided to us over the years. One of the causes of the lack of results of such courses might reside in the fact that their proponents don’t consider the knowledges of the teacher (Vera, 2015, OBEDUC/UFOP).

In a critical positioning, this excerpt of Vera’s narrative, who was always based on referential readings in the field, indicated that the continuing education courses in which she participated (Vera has 25 years of practice) do not consider, for numerous reasons, the knowledges and multiplicities of knowledges that teachers carry in their luggage. For this reason, the research gave her a place for critical reflexivity, as she calls, in order to provoke a unique professional development at the end of her career. Vera, in her long training path, accumulated discussions that reveal and constitute her as a very important collaborator researcher to the group. She shows how, in a posture of personal search, managed to develop professionally. However, she does not consider this the best way for continuing teacher training:

Studies show that, In Brazil, continuing teaching training features mainly two foci: one that focuses attention on the teacher subject in which there is personal development without exchanges between teachers, and without impact on school culture, and another aimed at the development of pedagogical teams, with a collaborative approach. In this perspective, the professional development only makes sense if it is able to trigger pertinent and necessary changes in schools to help them to meet more and better the needs of their clientele. It seems that continuing education as personal demand, despite offering professional development for the teacher, has a very little impact on school culture, since ‘without a collaborative atmosphere in school, educators will hardly recognize training as a benefit both individual and collective’ (Davis et al., 2011). That is why, more and more, teachers have felt the need to discuss the pedagogical doing from their praxis. According to the researchers conducted by Candau (1996), ‘the daily life at school is a locus of formation’. The author states, however, that this formative daily life should identify the issues in the classroom, understand them and allow one to work them collectively. That the school is a privileged training locus seems a consensus between most of the teachers that I know, but, at least in our case, the professional context does not favor this formation (Vera, 2015, OBEDUC/UFOP).

She continues her statement pointing out that the research project in which she is involved in the last three years has made her more mature and provoked what she had been looking for in isolation. After pointing the correlations of the theoretical questions that she appropriated in this investigative field, she concludes:

All these reflections emerged especially from my participation in the research project ‘Professional Teaching Development and Pedagogical Innovation: an exploratory study on the PIBID contributions’ of the OBEDUC. From the contact with the suggested bibliography and the exchange of experiences among the members of the project, I notice an awareness on my initial training and on my practice and, no doubt, despite the reality shock, I am increasingly willing to invest in quality public education for all (Vera, 2015, OBEDUC/UFOP).

In the teachers’ perception, the knowledge from professional experience or the knowledges on practice compose the bases of their competence and enable them to evaluate their initial training and their competence throughout their career. These knowledges, as ^{Tardif (2012}, p. 49) points out, are practical knowledges, integrated into the teaching practice, and form “[…] a set of representations from which teachers interpret, understand and guide their profession and daily practice in all its dimension”.

Thus, we are, step by step, appropriating the elements of collaborative research in teacher training and, to some extent, through projects, attending, as university, the interpellation of public elementary school in the collaboration of the training of its actors. The OBERI is inserted in this conjuncture, seeking to aggregate the research programs that are in this tune and to stimulate the training of the teacher researcher. Being the university a training agency, it cannot avoid this political commitment with the public school.

With this commitment, we do not want to simplify the academic research in general of the Education Sciences, but, on the contrary, to strengthen it in dialogue with the training school of the subjects in the regional society of the Inconfidentes. Referring to the argument of Zeichner on the relation between university and school researchers, so that, in the conduct of educational research, there is a defense of a greater interaction between the voices of teachers and academics, a more decisive role of the teachers in decision-making, a greater respect for teacher knowledge and of an ethical standard more accentuated by academics in their research relationships with teachers and schools.

We defend, therefore, an interaction between university and elementary school in the training process of men and women of this historical time that we have to experience, emphasizing that the fellow elementary school teachers, excited by the reflection process in the training spaces, found in the referred research a propitious ambience for their needs to rethink their professional teaching development.