Professional development and life stories of chemistry teachers: a multiple-case study

• Grant number: 07/02764-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2007
• End date: March 31, 2009
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education
• Principal Investigator: Carmen Fernandez
• Grantee: Josely Cubero
• Host Institution: Instituto de Química (IQ). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Becoming a teacher can be considered as a process which is constructed from the educational life story and during the subjects professional development in the context of Scholar Culture, and, therefore, comes first and goes beyond initial formation. We propose a research project to evaluate: i) possible relationships between important episodes in the investigated teachers’ life story and their teaching-learning conceptions; ii) the professional interactions present in the chemistry teachers speech that contribute to the construction of their teaching-learning conceptions; iii) possible contributions of the reflections proposed in the graduate discipline Teaching-Learning Conceptions in Theory and Practice of Chemistry Teachers for the awareness of the used conceptions. We intend to promote a contextualized reflection regarding the contradictions between pedagogical practice and teaching-learning conceptions considered as adequate by each investigated subject through: i) selected elements in the teachers speeches, such as scholar and academic trajectories; ii) the working environment and cultural insertion; and iii) the actions proposed in the discipline: to describe, to inform, to confront and to rebuild.