Narrativas de professoras da educação infantil: formação, prática docente e relação com as famílias em uma instituição comunitária

Abstract

This PhD thesis has emerged from my trajectory as a preschool teacher, from the challenges that followed it and took form in the commitment with children and their childhood years, and subsequently from my experience as a professor and coordinator of a Pedagogy course. In this trajectory, moved by my experiences and challenges, a concern became latent and motivated the key issue of this research: what do narratives of preschool teachers from a Community Institution in the city of Salvador, Bahia reveal about their education process, teaching practice and their relation with the children’s families? To that end, I elected as the main objective of this study: to understand, from the teachers’ narratives, their education route, their teaching practice journey and their relationship with the children’s families. This investigation took a qualitative approach path, based on the narrative inquiry (Clandinnin and Connelly, 2011; Souza, 2004, Momberger, 2015). Through the narrative interviews with three female teachers articulated to the perspective of the direct observation techniques and fieldworks, I analyze their close contact with the school culture. The data collection process provided me with the development of analytical and interpretative unities about the teachers’ childhood memories, which express the [dis]pleasure of their experiences with the reality that affect them in their family relations and school life, surrounded by rigor, games and learning. Concerning the teacher’s education and teaching practice, the narratives point out that the experience knowledge of the teachers of the Community Preschool/Child Care is a constant challenge when they deal with the little schooling of the parents, violence, drugs and financial limitations that affect the family eating habits. Those aspects were pointed by the teachers as inhibitors of a child’s development once such a social vulnerability directly impacts the child behavior at school. The imagined planning contradicts the real planning through the physical structure of the place, which is not arranged in compliance with the age group of children from four to five years old. By contrast, the actions and reactions of the teachers denote the resilience that emerges as a step to overcome the obstacles, on behalf of the child development and the relationship between schools and families. The inferences about the physical and emotional well-being with regard to the educational limits, which is still underrepresented in the family education, find in the education sphere the affection as a fundamental element in the relationship between teachers and children. The discourses that are displayed, in an explicit or implicit way, announce and denounce that the teachers’ conceptions of family still reproduce the idealization of a nuclear and traditional family composition. On the other hand, those discourses also break with the notions of conjugality, single mothers’ family formation, and the family responsibility transfer in relation to the act of teaching and caring to the investigated Community Preschool and Child Care.