Condição docente na educação infantil: representações do presente

Abstract

This research prioritized professional trajectories of five teachers and a professor in activity in early childhood education in Ilhéus / BA, aiming to interpret the representations of educational practice expressed in the narratives of these individuals. From this perspective, I sought the possibility of reconstitution of the expressions, words, silences, attitudes, feelings and knowledge that underlie the practices of early childhood education teachers and translate their concepts and sensibilities. I started from the assumption that there is a set of discourses that, somehow, help to build the representations of this practice. They are discourses on women, the division of labor, children and teaching, often backed in naturalistic conceptions, religious and political practices that integrate social and help build, maintain, and also overcome the teachers' identities. Through the diversity of theoretical approaches on the issue of representations I opted for dialogue with the representation theory proposed by French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1983). This option was based on the understanding that the assumptions Lefebvrean present as possible to unravel the conditions through which the representations of this practice have been formed. The dialogue with authors who have devoted to the issue of teaching conditions in early childhood education, as Kramer (2003, 2008), Rocha (2001), Cerise (2002), Silva (2008), and others, as well as questionnaires analysis and interpretation of narratives interviews (FLICK, 2004; BOLIVAR, 2002), led me to the conclusion that the teachers and kindergarten teacher, when considering their family backgrounds, experienced an upward movement in their social trajectories when they insertion in teaching. Today, however, individuals consider to be living in a time increasingly discredited, both economically and socially. Some social representations about the practice and education in early childhood education say that such activity as naturally feminine, non professional and directed towards the protection and supply the needs of children, somehow maintain some narrative passages of the individuals interviewed. However, these representations are contextualized and gain elements of the emerging practices that occur in institutions devoid of objective conditions; practices of care programs for children of popular area, as also, for pedagogical discourses that emphasize child development and child rights.