Conscientização e autonomia em formação on-line de professores

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2004

RESUMO

The sweeping changes taking place in society require a new way of dealing with education. In order to play its vital role in developing fulfilled, honest, politically and socially conscious citizens, schools need to be renewed. Such a renewal requires coming closer to students realities, encouraging creativity and the development of skills such as searching for, evaluating and applying information, fostering the capacity to identify and solve problems. This need is perceived by everyone: students, educators, parents and the society as a whole. The current education discourse assigns a new role to teachers, assumes that the new information and communication technology must be integrated in the process of teaching and learning and it is agreed that teacher and learner autonomy should be promoted. In such circumstances, practice allied to research in the field of teacher development becomes a priority. Taking this need into account, this study has two objectives. First, it aims to analyze four teacher-students process of autonomy development in an on-line course. Seeing autonomy not as a target to be reached but as a path it seeks to find evidences that it is being followed by the teacher-students. The second objective is to analyze how the critical and reflective dialog, essential in the development of autonomy, takes shape in the on-line environment. The definition of teacher autonomy adopted for this study draws on literature in the areas of language learner and teacher autonomy (Little, 2000; Lamb, 2000; Benson, 1997a, 1997b, 2001; Dam, 1995; Vieira, 1998; McGrath, 2000; Kumaravadivelu, 2001) and critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970, 1973, 1977, 1980, 1982, 1996). It refers to teachers capacity, willingness and right to make informed decisions about classroom tasks. Being informed, in this definition, means situating the task in its wider context, taking the different aspects involved in its design and implementation into account. It also means that the teacher perceives his or her and his or her students possibility of changing the cultural, social and political situation. Considering this definition, the study assumes that the development of autonomy presupposes a process that Paulo Freire calls conscientização and focuses on it. It argues that the involvement in the learning actions, as described in the learning by expansion model described by Engeström (1987, 1999b), leads to more advanced levels of awareness and therefore it may be considered as conscientização. Thus, this model and the theory that supports it, activity theory, are drawn upon for data analysis. According to this perspective, the contradictions concerning the main conversation topics are identified. The processes of identification and transformation of these contradictions are analyzed. In these processes, some evidences of autonomy in the teacher-students actions are revealed as well as the possibilities of the digital environment in the construction of critical and reflective dialog

ASSUNTO(S)

formação continuada linguistica aplicada

ACESSO AO ARTIGO

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