“Chamar a atenção sem chamar a atenção”: uma tomada de consciência em clínica da atividade docente

Abstract

This study examines a Portuguese Language teacher in Basic Education growing awareness of her professional teaching gesture of “attracting [students’] attention without attracting [their] attention”, that is, engaging them in the lesson without scolding them for inappropriate behavior. The corpus of this research consists of data produced by a volunteer teacher at a state high school in Pato Branco, Paraná, during an intervention in the Teaching Activity Clinic (TAC) in 2023, that is, as part of a continuing education program. The research problem centers on how to capture students’ attention, in the sense of engaging them in their studies, without reprimanding them, under real classroom conditions, considering that student inattention is a significant barrier to the teaching-learning process. Thus, the objective of this study is to investigate the teacher’s spontaneous gesture of highlighting the word “drafted” on the board while a student was reading a text aloud in class. We bear in mind here that for a teacher to effectively and efficiently capture a student’s attention, there must also be something that draws the teacher’s attention to their own activity. It is within this context that the method of self-confrontation is applied, an advanced observation technique and an opportunity for the professional, in this case the teacher, to observe themselves, describe in detail what they see themselves doing in the audiovisual recording, and analyze their classroom practice as an expert in their field, in accordance with the Activity Clinic methodology. This theoretical-methodological approach, developed by Lima (2021) and inspired by Clot (2010), makes it possible to identify, address, and overcome “blind spots” in educational practice. The TAC facilitator does not visit the school as an inspector of the teacher’s class or as an external expert, but rather observes the teacher without evaluating them and encourages reflection on their activity. The clinical data produced during the simple self-confrontation session were transcribed at the Transcription Workshop of a PPGL project at UTFPR’s Pato Branco Campus, in accordance with the transcription standards of the NURC/SP project (Preti, 1999). Data analysis was guided by a discursive (Bakhtin, 2016) and developmental (Vygotsky, 2008) perspective. The results indicate that the teacher’s spontaneous gesture observed in the audiovisual recording is a reenactment of teaching activity in a process of regulation and oscillation, referred to as regulatory activity (Lima, 2008; 2010), between two contradictory operations: 1) teaching and 2) preventing students from becoming distracted. Furthermore, the teacher’s realization is triggered by the articulation of thought through speech and by a sequence of reformulations of the spoken text (Cazzoli, 2026) in a situation of self-confrontation within the TAC.