Processos de identificação com a doc~encia : um olhar a partir da trajetória de formação de alunas em um curso de Licenciatura em Letras

Abstract

DENTIFICATION PROCESSES WITH TEACHING: A VIEW FROM THE TEACHER TRAINING OF PROSPECTIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING STUDENTS Author: Ida Maria Morales Marins Orientator: Dr. Hilário I. Bohn The present study investigates the identification processes of prospective language teachers with the professional tasks of language teaching. Students who participated in the study are enrolled in a Teaching Language Programme of a Public Brazilian University in Southern Brazil. The research aims at identifying the professional representations mobilized by these students along their training process at the University. To develop this main objective of the study the researcher will, first identify the discursive representations of the students about the teaching profession, and, second, to identify and analyze the formative practices that may contribute to the mobilization of the identification processes with the profession. The theoretical support of the study comes from the insights of the Cultural Studies, from Identity Studies, both dialoguing with the findings of sociological and social psychology research. For the analysis and interpretation of the data we also seek support from the linguistic dialogical theory as proposed by the Circle of Bakhtin. We furthermore assume that language plays a central role in the construction of personal and professional identities of human beings. Methodologically, the research is situated in a qualitative-interpretative paradigm, addressing the generation and data collection in a “quasi ethnographic” manner including observation, answers to a written questionnaire, the discourses of a focal group discussion, and the collection of documents of the institution in which students were receiving their professional training. Four students participated in the study. In the analysis and interpretation of the data we first discuss the representations of the professional language teacher in the learners’ written texts; after that, we work the second goal of the research, bringing two themes that emerge from the focal group. They are: the importance of the preservice training of teaching and the reflection as a formative practice. After that, we focus on the representations and practices involved in the processes of identification with the teaching profession. From the analysis and the interpretation, we identified a set of representations present in the language (discourse) of the students related to their living experiences, and also related to the theoretical-methodological, and discursive interventions along their training course. We found that the “acts of reflection on teaching”, that is, the “being and practicing the profession” were permeating the representations as well as the practices of students in the preservice training, contributing this way to the mobilization of the identification processes of the profession. From the observation of these findings, we defend the thesis that the learners’ identification process with teaching, in the course of initial training, is strongly related to the acts of reflection on teaching and in the teaching process as such.