Tutoring and action research in supervisioned training period: contributions to the Biology teaching education

Author(s)

Rosana dos Santos Jordão

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Educação (FE/SBD)
• Defense date: 2005-06-10

Examining board members

Maria Lucia Vital dos Santos Abib; Manoel Oriosvaldo de Moura; Roberto Nardi; Eduardo Adolfo Terrazzan; Silvia Luzia Frateschi Trivelato

• Advisor: Maria Lucia Vital dos Santos Abib

Abstract

This study belongs to the field of investigating the preservice teacher education. It assumes that teaching is a profession, and, as such, it involves a body of specific knowledge. It also includes the idea of the need to overcome the model of technical reasoning in teacher training in order to assume the model of reflective practice, centered on investigating the own work which is occurring in the classroom. Based on these presuppositions, the study focuses on the supervised training period, which has the features of being collective, tutored by a teacher of basic education and centered on action research. Taking into account these features, it aimed to investigate how it can contribute to forming the professional knowledge of the preservice teachers for a degree in a course of Biological Science. The study was developed in the Escola de Aplicação da Faculdade de Educação da Universidade de São Paulo, and the researcher was simultaneously a teacher of this school and a tutor of the training period. The group of student teachers was formed of six teacher candidates, who worked with pupils of the first year of High School. As well as giving lessons, they met the tutor weekly, for a period of two hours, during which they planned, analyzed and replanned together the pedagogical actions which were implemented with the pupils. Among possible methodologies, we opted for the case study. The data were obtained by means of: observations of the researcher, recorded in her field notebook; electronic mail exchanged between the tutor and the student teachers; different written documents, such as reports of a training period, questionnaires of evaluation, texts of self-evaluation; video recordings of the meetings and semi-structured interviews recorded on a tape recorder. The data was analyzed in two stages. In the first one, a module of lessons was analyzed in order to describe a set of reflective cycles of the action research and so as to show clearly the contexts in which the knowledge of the student teachers was displayed and transformed. The second one aimed at identifying how the knowledge was composed throughout all the process. The results obtained revealed transformations in the knowledge more linked to the context of the classroom, i.e. the pedagogical content knowledge, the practical knowledge and the general pedagogical knowledge (about learning, teaching, pedagogical actions, evaluation, class management, pupils and biological concepts). Knowledge of the curriculum and about educational objectives, which encompass reflections about the social role of the school and the teacher of Biology, were not looked at very much in this study. The analysis of these results showed that the main limit of the training period was the predominance of technical and practical focus points in the action research executed. The emancipatory focus was hardly present in the process. In spite of this limit, it was possible to identify improvements, in both the personal and the professional development of the students teachers, associated with the tutoring and the action research. Based on these results, the conclusion is that training periods which are tutored and centered on action research is a promising line to be considered and explored in the search for the much-needed improvement in training teachers. (AU)