Memórias de professores: convocações do presente.

Abstract

This research analyses current teachers recollections on their school lives and the influence of memories in their form of being and practicing the teaching activity. The study was realised between the years 2007 and 2009 and was based in individual interviews with 15 teachers from public schools in Belo Horizontes metropolitan region. In addition, it was also recorded a collective interview with 4 teachers and a narrative composition of one of them. As a theoretical approach for this study, among others, it was taken the discussion carried on by Maurice Halbwachs and Walter Benjamim, who have discussed the concepts of memory and experience. Their considerations permit us to point out that, at any time, human beings have the possibility of re-read and re-recollect past experiences and this is somewhat related to happenings in the present time. Without any intention to reach generalisations or numerical strength, the methodological procedures taken along with a qualitative assessment led this research to unveil what was meaningful in teachers past life as students. Once we have worked with communicative memory, we have discovered that memories were mainly related to: relationships that they have had with former teachers and classmates all surrounded by the architecture and places; their classes; the rituals, images and objects, that in the end constitutes the quotidian and the school culture. Connected by affection and various feelings, all these memories were related sometimes as moments and experiences of pleasure and joy, sometimes as difficulties and suffering. The narratives of the investigated teachers are referred to the period between the decades of 1950 and 1990, and that permitted us to observe changes in the pedagogical practices inside classroom if compared to the present time. We have also found changes between teachers and students relationships, above all, in the behavior with remembered teachers, in values and principles, in proximity with each other, or in critical exercise taken in classrooms. Thus, oriented by theoretical and methodological principles of qualitative research, particularly by the oral history, this research seeks to comprehend what such recollections represent and their importance in the current teachers experiences, understanding that the present time recall, re-mean and actualize them.