Formação de professores e o ensino superior - um estudo exploratório

Abstract

The aim of this essay was to study the conditions of the training process of individuals for lecturing at colleges and universities in Brazil. Our starting point was learning about the lack of legislation and adequate courses which meet the requirements for lecturing in such degree. By and large, the selection of lecturers is grounded on technical competence or specific knowledge in their working areas, based on the belief that knowing the subject contents is all one needs to teach it. Due to the broadness of the topic, we have chosen to carry an exploratory study of a given teacher training institution, looking at the courses offered and their contents, as well as the methodology utilized. We have decided to include an ethnographic qualitative survey to be completed by those attending the afore mentioned courses. For that purpose, they will also be interviewed and asked for reports on the benefits such courses have brought to their professional growth. Our studies focused on reading Brazilian and foreign authors, such as Paulo Freire, Mario Sérgio Cortella, Marcos T. Masetto, Ana Maria Saul, Mere Abramowicz, Pedro Demo, Joseph Lowman, Philippe Perrenoud, Maurice Tardif, César Coll, Edgar Morin, Neil Postman and many others, who wrote about the topic of this essay. As a result, we realized that the chosen institution had only sowed the seed of awareness and commotion for the necessity of inclusion of specific papers about education and its applications in the curricula for training lecturers. That would involve skills in pedagogy, didactics, the philosophy of teaching, teaching techniques and above all, the contents of teaching and learning processes. As we came to the end of this essay, we realized that we truly commenced a new journey towards novel expertise. Following the trek, we found countless knowledge treasures which led us to new and successive discoveries. In fact, we noticed that in order to become better teachers, we need to become better human beings and better learners in the first place.