A COMPLEXIDADE DA DOCÊNCIA NOS ANOS INICIAIS NA ESCOLA PÚBLICA

Abstract

Building a democratic and high-quality yearly years public education is still a challenge. This article aims to reflect upon teaching the early years under the view of teachers who work in the educative area, emphasizing their social role, their rewards and their challenges. To this purpose, this research uses a qualitative approach and implicates bibliographical study, document analysis, reflexive interviews and content analysis in tabulating data. It involved twenty early years’ teachers in three counties in the countryside of the state of São Paulo. We concluded that the meaning of being a teacher is emphasized by a good command of the knowledge areas which consist the early year’s national curriculum. According to the empirical data, the early years teachers’ main role is the child’s whole development, emphasizing the skills of reading, writing and counting. The biggest reward consists of the interaction with the child, when the teacher is able to see their development in the process of teaching-learning. The challenges are centered mainly at the absence of the family in the child’s schooling, the diversity of students due to the democratization of education and, in a lower level, tertiary teachers’ training courses, the depreciation of the public school and the public teacher and the Brazilian educational system structure. We found that the early year’s teacher in public schools faces a challenging reality to practice their profession because the initial and continuous training courses are precarious, weakened and not decontextualized to build a critical-reflexive intellectual who is able to respond to the highlighted challenges in this research. We defend the need of a public policy which values the teacher, emphasizes the quality of teacher training, set appropriate wages, constantly stimulates professional development and improves working conditions, to futures teachers as well as the ones who are already working.

http://dx.doi.org/10.14572/nuances.v22i23.1767