O professor da Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte e as representações sociais do saber pedagógico

Abstract

Based on the “teaching, research and extension” tripod, as stated in the Federal Constitution in its article 207, the Brazilian university has a strategic role for national development, as it trains qualified professionals and produces knowledge. However, numerous problems arise in the scenario of Brazilian higher education. One of these problems concerns teaching. We know that teachers when they enter Brazilian higher education bring serious deficiencies in their pedagogical training, since the prerequisite for university teaching is understood as a preparation and not as a training. About this, Law No. 9,394 / 96 in its article 66, provides that, “the preparation for the exercise of higher teaching will be done at the postgraduate level, primarily in master's or doctoral programs”. Thus, LDB states that pedagogical training is dispensable at the expense of specific preparation. To try to remedy the deficiencies in the training of university professors, some universities have created programs and projects for continuing education. At UFRN, for example, we have the Pedagogical Update Program (PAP). However, despite institutional efforts, the challenges of teaching in higher education at UFRN still remain, and more accurate reflection is needed. In order to understand these shortcomings in the training of higher education teachers, in this work we investigated the social representations of pedagogical knowledge for UFRN teachers who participated in PAP over two meetings that took place in 2019, in order to understand which symbolic references were mobilized. for teaching and what are its gaps regarding didactic training. We used the Theory of Social Representations of Serge Moscovici (2011; 2012) as a theoretical and methodological contribution and for the apprehension of the data the Free Word Association Technique (TALP). The seized data were organized in the form of the Spiral of Senses, developed by Elda Melo (2019), according to the Structural Approach of Jean-Claude Abric (1998). For the analysis of the materials we used, in addition to the Theory of Social Representations, the Content Analysis proposed by Bardin (2011), which allowed us to infer the information contained in the TALP and to interpret the semantic dimensions of the evoked words. The data of our research demonstrate that the UFRN professors participating in the PAP represent the pedagogical knowledge from a distinction delimited between the specific knowledge of their education and the knowledge specific to the field of pedagogy. This distinction reflects a “naturalized” conception of pedagogical knowledge, revealing insufficient pedagogical training and producing, in the psychosocial sphere, an antithetical sense between these two types of knowledge, characterized as a thêmata. Pedagogical knowledge is represented by the group of teachers as an instrumental resource that can, once used, make the transmission of knowledge efficient, implying a traditional view of teaching. The lack of a clear guideline on the training of university professors gives rise to the need, in the ambit of postgraduate and continuing education, to give a new meaning to the formative culture in order to offer, in a more solid way, the pedagogical references necessary for the teacher of the higher education, with a view to overcoming this antinomy between pedagogical knowledge and specific knowledge, and incorporating didactic knowledge as an integral part of their professional training and not just as a dispensable instrumental appendix.