Onde está a inovação? A tensão entre permanências e mudanças nas práticas de professores/as em escolas inovadoras

Abstract

The work of teaching at school reveals interesting aspects of a culture. It demonstrates the oscillation in this work, between being recognized and being poorly paid, the apparent social importance given to the teaching profession, and the lack of material conditions contributing to its exercise. Despite this, innovative initiatives made by public school teachers occur to provoke their practices that are constituted in the tension of permanence- change. The problem of this study focuses on the points that lead to implementing these innovations and the central role of teachers in implementing changes in their practices. It starts from a developmental perspective based on semiotic cultural psychology that understands human development through life trajectories through the meaning-making processes mediated by signs. It points to the cultural psychology of education as an expedient for development studies in educational contexts. As the main objective, we seek to explain how the meaning-making process occurs based on the sign of innovation and how they are expressed in the practices of teachers who work in innovative schools, under the developmental gaze of semiotic cultural psychology. The specific objectives were: (1) Investigate school routines in educational innovation spaces and their role in the meaning- making process for teachers based on the sign of innovation; (2) Understand what are and how work the signs that clarify the genesis, context and maintenance of innovation and their emergence in the professional trajectories of the teachers investigated; (3) Demonstrate the particularities and generalities in the developmental processes of teachers through a theoretical model based on semiotic cultural psychology in contexts of educational innovation. The method used was qualitative, with an idiographic approach and an ethnomethodological design through which ethnography was conducted. Considering the person-context unit of analysis in developmental systems, 17 teachers from two innovative public schools in Brasília, Distrito Federal, called Learning Communities, participated in the study. To co-construct the data, 4 stages were carried out: (a) ethnography of the school context; (b) Individual Interview A, with a semi-structured script with 6 teachers, 3 from each Learning Community; (c) Individual Interview B, with conflicting dialogue situations with 6 teachers, 3 from each Learning Community and; (d) Research, Reflection and Training Group with 11 teachers from one of the Learning Communities. The co-construction of the data aimed to highlight how the sign of innovation regulates the participants' experience, configuring their developmental systems at a social and individual level. The analysis followed the theoretical guidance given by semiotic cultural psychology in three stages: (a) thematic axes of individual interviews in conjunction with information from the field diary; (b) analysis of conflicting dialogue situations guided by the signs identified in the previous stage; (c) information produced in the Research, Reflection, and Training Group. As a result, we identified that dissatisfaction and collective work are signs that make up the developmental dynamics of teachers in which the sign of innovation acts as a mediator of the tension between permanence and changes in the practices of participants with different meanings according to each teacher's experience. Apart from understanding how the sign of innovation regulates the experience of teachers, we highlight the genesis, context, and maintenance of the innovative process. Therefore, we affirm that innovation is an individual, continuous process that occurs under certain contextual conditions and is maintained due to a relational mechanism, which we call persistent innovation. Persistent innovation has the function of anchoring and triggering the individual meaning-making process about innovation, causing these meanings to change throughout the planning and implementation of practices concerning contextual conditions under the guidance and order of collective work. In this sense, innovations are produced daily in the schools studied through small changes depending on the context and the quality of collective work.