Pedagogical conceptions and practices of education: significances of professors from the free association of words

Abstract

This study focuses on pedagogical practices and conceptions in the view of teachers of this research were: 1) which meanings compose the narration of teachers’ practice in the school’s every day routine in the development of the learning-teaching process as for teaching strategies, pedagogical resources and learning evaluation; 2) more generically, which conceptions underlie the reports on these teaching practices; 3) to understand by means of narratives the relationship between pedagogical practices and conceptions. The theoretical basis is the one provided by Bruner (1977) by examining the every day routine and the studies about the knowledge of the profession. The data were collected together with teachers of governmental and private schools in the municipality of São Paulo and in a municipality in the greater São Paulo by free word association. In order to analyse and interpret the answers we examined the content, grouped the answers into categories and themes and later they were crossed. The results presented by the narratives don’t stress a pedagogical conception in the same direction, but emphasize a set of ideas and meanings that are connected in their practices and constitute an amalgamation of different pedagogical positions making up ideas by resorting to the educational process and the work. The teachers interviewed for this study besides their teacher training took other courses to continue their work as a service and to keep the dynamics of their jobs, in the relationships among their peers and with pedagogical coordinators and directions in the daily practice in the classrooms seem to constitute a symbiotic way of thinking and acting where perspectives of a more traditional conception are combined with several aspects of an active pedagogy and some traits of more contemporary perspectives, as in constructivism