As representações do agir professoral: um estudo à luz do interacionismo sociodiscursivo

Abstract

This dissertation presents results of a study on the representation that two high school teachers of Portuguese language make about their own work before indiscipline/conflict situations in class by analyzing the modalizations present in their speech. The main goal of this research was to investigate the representation itself of the teacher about his acting of teaching, and the specific ones were: analyzing how the teacher modalizes his speech before indiscipline/conflict situations in class and investigating the way he handles the modalization when talking about his own acting in these moments. The object under study is, hence, the teacher’ speech produced in class (real acting) as well as in self-confrontation (represented acting). Data were obtained from two public schools in the state of Ceara, through the observation and videorecording of lectures hold by the two volunteers, and after applying a questionnaire and an interview in self-confrontation, as well. The theoretical framework of the Sociodiscursive Interacionism (BRONCKART, 1999, 2006, 2008), which provides important elements to the analysis of representations of the acting of teaching (CICUREL, 2010, LEURQUIN, 2013) was adopted, and the data was analyzed from the texts produced by the teacher and, particularly, from the modalizations. From this study, we observed that the teacher used mostly deontic modalizations when dealing with indiscipline in class, especially the permissive ones (can + infinitive). On the other side, during the self-confrontation stage, aprpeciative and logical modalizations dominated the speech, especially when the teacher talked about the influence of students’ indiscipline in his acting. Altough each volunteer revealed different representations, we observed that both of them mentioned the dialog as a strategy to help facing the indiscipline and, in addition, both of them pointed the importance of investigating the underlying reasons for students’ behaviour. We concluded that the adopted methodology is relevant to understand indiscipline. Furthermore, we noted that the volunteers took different strategies to deal with indiscipline/conflicts in class. In fact, such strategies varied from class to class. We observed also that, in general, the volunteers rated the situations as conflicting according to different judgement criteria. To explain this difference, we highlight the representations themselves revealed in the self-confrontation stage. The scenario in which the investigation was done also played a role, since the two volunteers work at different schools. Summing up, this research showed us that, to get an understanding of the indiscipline in class and the teachers’ reaction before it, we have to analyze what teachers say about their own acting before the indiscipline.