Professores de inglês de Parintins e a experiência da metamorfose: da formação à atuação no ensino básico

Abstract

This thesis presents the meanings that emerge in the words of English teachers working in public schools in the city of Parintins, Amazonas. The research has the objective of shedding light on their journeys, knowledge and educational processes. The study is in the fied of Applied Linguistics and it is based on discourse studies, having the Franco-Brazilian Discourse Analysis as a theoretical-methodological reference. The analysis of these teachers’ journeys points to transformation processes, corroborating the concept of identity, in Ciampa (1984), as a metamorphosis. This understanding comes across the relation between experience and transformation in Larrosa (2016) explored in this research to explain how certain facts, including academic education, can be apprehended (or not) as an experience, as something that touches and transforms teachers. The English teacher from Parintins, as someone subjected to experience, speaks from a place that in this study is taken in consideration in the light of decolonial studies. Thus, the concept of experience, along with the discursive concepts and the concept of decoloniality form the thesis theoretical framework. The research corpus consists of statements from twelve teachers from municipal and state schools in Parintins, both in the urban and rural areas. To build the corpus, two research instruments were used: a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The corpus analyses follow the principles and procedures gathered mainly in the work of Orlandi (2009). In the analyses I mobilize notions such as imaginary formation, memory, representation and discursive formation. To access experience, I try to apprehend the effects of meaning underlying the teachers' answers and I try to show how Amazonian literature, particularly Milton Hatoum’s works, contribute to the interpretation of their sayings. Imaginary formations and language materiality manifested in the corpus are also explored through analyses of the socio-historical context in which the teachers are inserted. Teachers, in the questions addressed to them, are invited to talk about their understandings of what it means to be a teacher, to tell about people or facts that marked their educational journeys, about their pedagogical practices and about the meaning of teaching English in their teaching contexts. In their answers, movements can be apprehended and can be related to the metamorphosis cycle and its four stages (egg, larva, pupa and imago). The passages from one stage to another happen as a result of the experience, i.e., as an effect of a singular event that touches the teachers and leads them to transformation. The events are identified in the teachers’ journeys in different circumstances and make us understand that thinking on teacher education involves an investigation beyond academic education. This understanding opens space for other educational processes and highlights nderrepresented regions in Applied Linguistics studies, thus consolidating the purpose of this thesis which is to shed light to Parintins English teachers’ experience.