The teaching suffering: only those who act can also suffer

Author(s)

Caroline Fanizzi

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Educação (FE/SBD)
• Defense date: 2022-12-01

Examining board members

José Sergio Fonseca de Carvalho; Vanessa Sievers de Almeida; Hélio Salles Gentil; Leandro de Lajonquière; Ilaria Pirone

• Advisor: José Sergio Fonseca de Carvalho

Abstract

Only those who act can also suffer. This was the premise that guided the entire elaboration of this thesis. From it, we seek to clarify our understanding of the phenomena of the teachers suffering. Despite the universality of suffering as a human experience, we are dedicated to examine the contours that it acquires in the exercise of the teaching profession and the way it affects teachers. For this, we resort to voices and events that emerge from the teaching routine and, in particular, to the narrative of a teacher who, at the beginning of the 20th century, decides to publicize her experience as a teacher and transform it into the book O Calvário de uma professora [The calvary of a teacher] (1928). Teacher suffering is a recurring theme in Brazil. In social and mediatic discourses, conversations in elementary school teachers rooms and academic debates, there is a frequent discussion about how sick, unauthorized, and undervalued teachers are in our country. Faced with the material precariousness, aspects such as low salaries, work overload, crowded classes, lack of resources in schools are often signalized as the supposed causes of the teachers suffering. Student indiscipline, disrespect from superiors and students families, devaluation by governments and society in general are also identified as elements that participate in what makes a teacher suffer. This last set of elements composes the condition that we name here as the symbolic precariousness of the teaching profession. Often operating in conjunction with material precariousness, the symbolic precariousness of the teaching profession empties the teachers distinctive place in society, erases their symbolic inscription in life with others and imposes on teachers the paradox of inhabiting a nonplace. Educational discourse, today deeply marked by a technicist logic, seeks to fill this empty space with a series of techniques and methodologies supposedly capable of conferring efficiency and assertiveness on teaching. The teacher would only have the task of executing them properly. The absence of a distinctive place in society, added to the constraints imposed on teaching action by the discourse of technicization of teaching, we propose, constitute the scenario from which the phenomena of teaching suffering emerge. Thus, in this study, we developed the proposition that teacher suffering is a phenomenon resulting from threats and constraints inflicted on the teacher\'s capacities as a human agent, namely, the capacity to say, the capacity to act, the capacity to narrate and the capacity of self-esteem (RICUR, 2005, 2014). Complementarily, from an Arendtian perspective, we examine teacher suffering as a phenomenon resulting from threats to the possibility of the teacher being present in his profession as someone (ARENDT, 2015). Furthermore, before restricting it to an illness, paralysis or teaching resignation that must be extinguished or remedied, we propose that the suffering enunciated by a teacher is an indication of potency. Potency that, expressed in the form of a complaint, says about the subject who suffers, but mainly about the subject who resists. (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 19/14645-0 - The teacher in times of technique: teaching between action and fabrication
• Grantee: Caroline Fanizzi
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate