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The teacher and teachers’ educators: questioning teacher education reforms

Sonia Martins de Almeida Nogueira

Universidade Estadual do Norte Fluminense Darcy Ribeiro

1 Introduction

The process of educating teachers is a primary focus for an analytical and reform perspective, rooted in two assumptions, both of which were clearly produced in the 80s:

•The scope and diversity of changes going through worldwide ever since the beginning of the decade have produced different social representations of democratic citizenship. Thus, the question of what education to what citizenship is posed, in an attempt to find an immediate answer to the social and political demands, intensely established throughout the end of the years 1990.

•Teacher education is identified to quality and excellence in education and so its reform is an absolutely necessary condition, should the learning systems adjust to fit and respond to the problems presently evidenced.

The social role played by the teacher along with his technical competence, as well as the emphasis on the alleged relationship between educative action and citizenship, among other important points to be considered, lead to the reform of teacher education in the present. Thus, the implementation of new models of education of teachers must take into account not only certain strategies, perspectives and methods but also an intensive and permanent interaction between the school, its surroundings and society, so that it can promote educational programs that are at the same time effective and innovative.

The 45th Session of the International Conference of Education (ICE) which took place in September 1996 was dedicated to the discussion of the increasing importance of the role played by teachers in the educative process, identifying, among other important aspects, the fact that there are greater expectations as respects their task: teachers will be more and more valued for their domain of knowledge and competences and, in addition, by their personal qualities, which are progressively considered a sine qua non requisite (Tedesco, 1996).

Indeed, the task of the teacher, once more being revisited, is designed in the trace of his professional profile. We have the conviction that any proposal of teacher education reform must be referenced in a theoretical framework based on values, for the sake of not reducing it to a mere listing of strategies and methodological guidelines, aiming the efficiency of the practice but not taking into consideration the imperative issue of the educational postulates (Nogueira, 1996, p.8).

This is much more visible and evident as contemporary society, due to its characteristics, expands its challenges, claiming our commitment to a political action designed to overcome these challenges. We search then the development and consolidation of theories that can shape and contribute for the desired cultural (ideology) and political (economy) changes.

We are thinking of a reform of teacher education in accordance to the contemporary educational reality. This assertive expresses a proposal for the education of teachers based on the grasping of the technological revolution undergoing in the communication field, the valuation of differences, the celebration of diversity and the recognition of the need for reflexive and committed teachers.

This line of argumentation unfolds three important questions: 1) the pedagogical practice of the teacher as relates his system of values (critical and committed to what?), revealing the significance that education has to a teacher; 2) the developing awareness of theoretical guidelines, a basis and a framework for a pedagogical practice that necessarily leads to a conceptual and empirical research; 3) the essential interaction between values and education, a pillar for a critical and creative thinking, which is, on its turn, an indispensable tool of innovation.

Besides, we focus the political option of the teacher in his educative action: it implies his choices as regards the social and cultural specific manifestations of contemporary scenario. In which case, an education of teachers adequate to the experienced reality must be originated from a socially significant curriculum with political content; the fundamental characteristics of culture and education inserted in this culture are to be met in the elaboration of teacher education proposals which, on the other hand, demand a theoretical framework.

This paper is organized around the following axes of analysis: a brief account of the historical course, with special emphasis placed on the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s; a permanent dialog with reality in the realm of knowledge society; the importance of an academic and theoretic background in teacher education and some other relevant issues, to enable us get back to our departing point: the teacher who educates teachers.

  1. A brief account of the historical course in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s[1]

The docent function was born at the same time of its functional character, in the same way that happened with other professions designed in the historical process of labour organization, the structuring of jobs and occupations and the innovation of productive procedures, a process which complexity was gradually increased since the dawning of Modernity. Like any other profession, it has been ever since identified to a set of semi-structured activities aiming at easily describable and identifiable objectives, with views to fulfill the social needs characterized in the production system.

In its particularity, the docent function was related to teaching to read and write and norms and social rules, promoting the memorization of the necessary contents to enable teachers to perform simple and specific tasks, in other words, activities that did not imply greater requirements than to have experience in teaching and a minimum level of school education compatible with what they intended to teach.

However, the ordenating models of society configured alongside the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought to the twentieth century, among other challenges, that of a permanent inquiring of teacher education and teachers’ professional practice, considering the social function of school vis-à-vis the implemented political models.

During the nineteenth century, education was incorporated to the political sphere, since its main purpose was the formation of citizens. The adopted assumption was that a democratic society could only develop in the domain of the participation of all in the political process through the vote, and this meant the consciousness of individuals as members of society; so, the thesis of education presented itself as one of the constitutive elements of the participative process and the educational policy, on the other hand, represented a component of the movement toward the consolidation of the State.

The paradigm of modernity was rooted in reason, identified as a project and instrument to dominate nature and produce progress (Casassus, 1995, p. 9). Thus, the project of education for all nested in the political proposition of the Nation-State was linked to the idea of progress, immanent to the Industrial Revolution. The latter constituting the creation process of a new culture of work relations based in the inter-relationship of forces actuating over the new scenario, restructuring the social organization and consolidating a political model which paradigm was progress, in this new assumption.

The linking between the educational project and progress has highlighted the matter of the specific requirements relating to human resources; teachers would be the carriers (although not the only ones) of a set of actions which would enable to effectivate the proposal of progress promotion; consequently, the education of teachers became a matter of public interest.

The first decades of the twentieth century revealed the existence of a political intention aiming at the construction and consolidation of the public system of education, what is revealed by the formulation of a set of educational policies and legislation for educational instances, this legislation being characteristically doctrinary and normative and a primary object of the educational contents and practices. On the other hand, pedagogical theses were widely discussed, from the moment they were supported by theories generated in social sciences, biology and psychology.

Progressively, the importance of a professional training for educators has been accentuated, with views to better meet the purposes established by educational policies and thus increase the efficiency of the school in meeting these goals. Education should privilege technical competence based on the humanistic ideals, preparing educating agents of an educational project to orient their action according to political stability and social development, a model that prevailed in Brazil until the 60’s, when the theory of human capital contributed to reinforce the functionalist theses, emphasizing pragmatic ideals.

However, the last years of the 70’s characterized the crisis of the developmentist strategies triggered by the increase on oil price worldwide, what exposed the fragility of these strategies when faced to the oscillations of the global market.

In addition, there was in the same period an outburst of critical analyses about the concept and the social function of education, which promoted a necessary reasoning on the closed interactions of educational systems and social structures, the economic system and the political cycle. The ideas of Bourdieu and Passeron, Althusser, Bowles and Gintis, Baudelot and Establet and Martin Carnoy circulated over the academic environment in Brazil, generating debates and concurring to the weakening of the theoretical anchoring of the role played by education and, at the same time, contributing to the devaluation of education as a factor of social mobility.

On the other hand, it was in the 80’s that an accelerating scientific and technological development made it imperious to think more rigorously and broadly about the articulation of education with the political system (political and institutional reality), in which this articulation implies the need for social change, a dialog with reality, the breakthrough of understanding and facing the impacts of scientific and technological progress (Nogueira, 1994, p.17).

Yet, in the same period, the flowering of propositive critics took place, in other words, the issues raised in the 60’s and 70’s gave room to a more concrete criticism in terms of their references as well as to the effective proposals of change ensuring the pivotal role of education alongside the inter-connections of social integration and development, at the same time liberating educational policies from conjunctural and governmental plans, placing them in the terrain of a State policy (Casassus, 1995; Silva, 1991).

The requirements formulated by this educational context proposed for teacher education and the exercise of the profession exposed the inadequacies of the proposals implemented in the last thirty/forty years: they have not been able so far to improve the quality of this education overall in terms of teachers’ competence; schools have not been able to ensure to students the minimum educational requirements; education appears disarticulated from the labor world; education is obsolescent and the schooling cycle is developed as a process disconnected from real life. Although teacher’s individual competence is not the only element to outline this scenario, it should not be minimized.

A careful and thorough reading of the history of teachers education in Brazil matches the analysis made by Silva (1991, p. 17), whose thesis hosts the idea that fossilized concepts and practices have furnished – both in terms of the structural organization of the educational systems and the available proposals of teacher education themselves – the elements providing educational apparatuses with the necessary conditions to proceed in its historical course and, in this sense, neither educational systems nor teacher education have been capable to eliminate the residues of a structure deprived of historical legitimacy.

Indeed, mention must be made to the fact that there is a strong vinculation among the problems identified today, both in terms of the unfoldings of teacher education and the teaching practice, within the frame of the present educational system, for the social and political determinants that have influenced and continue to influence its organization are variables emerging from the tendencies and strategies of this education and this professional practice.

The arising of the public systems of education and the professional exercise of teachers have an historical background, according to which the latter was established without an effective political action to organize, promote and consolidate a program of teachers education as a State responsibility; progressively, notwithstanding the belief that professorship should be exercised as a vocational call, comparable to a priesthood, the idea of a special and specific training for teaching activities was raised.

Conceptual and execution lines of teacher education have configured a plot of social and political determinants for the organization of the educational system itself.

  1. The years 1990: a dialog with the knowledge society

Since the fourteenth century up to the closing of the millennium, successive models of scientific knowledge, society and individual (the subject) have been implemented. All these attempts shelter a conception of modernity linked to the antagonism rationalization vs. subjectivity: modernity is, in other words, a dialog between Reason, on one hand, and the Subject, on the other.

We have experienced the fundamental idea of modernity: the triumph of reason. Touraine (1994, p. 10) states, however, that the central idea of progress as the path to freedom, abundance and happiness and that these three objectives are strongly interconnected is nothing more than an ideology that is constantly denied by history. We are increasingly questioning modernity.

Demo (1993, p. 22) analyses the relationship between modernity and education, raising some hypotheses which place education in a relevant path in both political (citizenship) and economic (productivity) terms. The brief account made on item 1 of this paper allows us to analyze this relationship. Besides, we can acknowledge the fact that, on the way towards its consolidation, the Brazilian political model has, since imperial times, suffered changes that influenced the very structuring logic of the educational system, with respect to its functional and societal sense and its interactions in other fields of the political action (political system and economic system).

There is a historical context in which, during the last decades of the 20th Century and in the beginning of 2Ist Century envisages an accelerating progress of Science and the deployment of high complexity technologies. In this scenario, some social and culture processes were universalized, which dynamics is revealed by the dialectics between the impact of science and technology in the world- of- life, our cultures and communitarian relations.

It is within this reality that globalization presents itself as a dominant tendency. Taken as a historical and unbridling phenomenon (the reins being in the hands of every particular historical process) occurred in the formation of society itself, globalization represents a re-ordering of the spaces of social reproduction, demanding new alternatives to surpass the existing social-political organization and creation of a particular transition period, an interregnum, attentive to productive, citizenship and international contexts and to the different levels of development which shape and are shaped by the interactions established in the particularities of every nation (Nogueira, 1997, p. 3-4).

However, our global society nests an internationalized culture, bred in the process of globalization of socio-cultural patterns and values and cultural products, promoting modifications, integration of new patterns and incorporation of values coming from dominant centers, once the cultural bounds are broken (Ianni, 1996; Dowbor, 1996; Schaff, 1995). It is to be taken into consideration, though, the undesired presence of evidences of a neo-imperialism and a cultural neo-colonialism, once we acknowledge the social elements of cultural values that spread and disseminate the profile of wealthier societies detaining more advanced technologies and dominating the information diffusion (Schaff, 1995, p 79-81).

Once we are aware of these facts and make a reflection about the differences in the cultural formation of societies, knowing the rhythm and the pace they occur, we can identify the conceptual and praxiologic breakthrough faced by education, the challenge of a paradigmatic change. This challenge must be measured, for there are elements of cultural reconstruction, integration, socialization and individuation generated in the dynamics of ever-changing oppositions/compositions of force. It must be constructed in a domain of reflection about the social quality of the utopia that the knowledge society proposes, in the perspective of globalization, and inquire: educate for what citizenship?

  1. Teachers education: the relevance of a theoretical basis

When we understand education as a fundamental strategy in the search of social development stricto sensu, we focus the principle of quality in education, a structural element of the political project into which it is inserted. This conception of social quality has to do with innovation, attempting to respond to the necessity of change actualized in the relationships between the educational, political and economic systems. The assumption here is that quality emerges in the concrete form of an innovative process, favouring the progressive enrichment of the educative practice, in the sense theoretical propositions (pedagogical stricto sensu) inspire this practice and the broader educational objectives (Nogueira, 1995, p.2).

When we refer to the educational process, we point out to the teacher and inquire about his education. It is not possible to innovate if the teacher is not committed to innovation. On the other hand, innovation in education require professionals with the ability to orient their pedagogical action through a guideline generated in a collective reflection, which supposes a necessary pedagogical competence. In this case, the education of the teacher should enhance the development of his competence (conceived as the binomial science/technique) and offer him intellectual instruments, using an expression by Florestan Fernandes, to overcome the ideological and practical constraints that could be imposed by his education, even when this education is nourished by science and technique and by the conditions of his professional practice.

We have then three basic principles orienting the education of the teacher: his personal commitment, the meaning of education to his own consciousness and his experience and hierarchical system of values, principles that will lead the process of development of an academic competence and the enhancement of moral and theoretical paradigms. This process has as a purpose the strengthening of the political consciousness of the teacher, so that he can understand and take his duty.