Continuing education: constitution and contributions for the faculty identity

Abstract

Continuing education, as one of the aspects that has the role of contributing to the professional development of the teacher, becomes an element of research when it is intended to study the professional identity of teachers. Thus, this article is about a cut of the research titled “Interface between continuing education and professional identity” that wanted to verify if continuing education, besides enabling the improvement inherent to the pedagogical activity, also makes possible the contribution to the improvement and reconfiguration of the teachers’ identity. In order to undertake the study, we had Dubar, Imbernón, André and Lüdke and Creswell, as theoretical and methodological references. This report refers to a qualitative field research and the data was collected through interviews, with the participation of ten (10) elementary school teachers from the municipal schools of the city of São Paulo. The results suggest that some formative processes contribute to the reconfiguration of teacher’s identity, through specific elements, made possible in these trainings. Thus, it was possible to reveal that, in the structuring of these educations, there were: the teacher’s co-participation through interaction and integration at the time of training; cognitive mobilization through actions during the process and on the subject under study; and the association between theory and practice made possible by the contextualization of the theme in practice.