Revisiting teaching trajectories: a synergy between contexts and provisions

Abstract

What motivated this work was to investigate the conditions that strongly influence the specificities of the teaching profession, as well as the demands that need to be met for the professional development of teachers. Many works of an empirical nature bring results on these elements, however, in general, based on events well located and restricted in time. In this work, however, we seek to advance in this same perspective through the reconstruction of teaching trajectories that can be considered successful due to a continuous investment in the career and to present a professional development in several dimensions over time. Based on the survey of a relatively large set of information (several interviews, Lattes curriculum, publications), we reconstructed the teaching trajectories of two physics teachers, in the form of a methodological device called sociological portrait. In our case, this device contributed to reconstruct the professional trajectories of teachers and articulate their heritage of dispositions, characterizing them in terms of their genesis, that is, their conditions and training modalities. Thus, we seek to answer which institutional conditions (possibilities of choices and resources), subjective characteristics (skills, competences and dispositions) and social contexts (family, school, university) can influence the teaching trajectory, in the sense of making it a continuous search educational innovations? According to our analysis, it was possible to conclude that the teachers' careers were regulated by the set of individual characteristics, as well as by institutional policies and by occasional events that contributed to their stability and to their satisfaction in acting professionally in science education. The continuity of this stability could be seen in the personal integration that was achieved through his choices in various fields, which facilitated the ways in which they conducted their careers. We hope that when presenting cases such as those reported in this work, the social representation of teaching in Sciences can be perceived as a productive career.