Olhar para a diversidade: representações do professor pedagogo em formação

Abstract

This is a research related to Letters, Linguistics and Arts, specifically in the area of Language - Applied Linguistics, with the intention to verify the representations of the Pedagogy graduation course students from two different higher education institutions in south-west Paraná, concerning concepts about culture and education for diversity. The purpose of this study is justified by the fact that the participants leave the graduation enabled to work with child education and the initial grades of elementary school. It is in the beginning of school life that children get in touch with scientific knowledge and start developing cultural and discursive consciousness, besides expanding world notions, with the teacher’s mediation. The subjects of this research are students of the first and the last semester of the referred course, being four of them from each institution, two of each semester. The research is qualitative, because it seeks to understand phenomena that involve human beings and theirs social relations, in the context in which they occur and which they are part of. For this, the discourse of the undergraduates was taken as object of study. In addition, we also took as base the description of some subjects from the pedagogy course of the participating institutions to analyze if they provide theoretical and practical foundations to work with diversity in the classrooms. Data were collected in the educational institutions, using a semi-structured questionnaire that served as a script for interviews, which were recorded in audio and transcribed later. To analyze them, concepts related to culture, multiculturalism, discourse analysis and ideology were used, as well as official documents such as laws and resolutions. The results were organized into five categories related to culture perspectives, diversity perspectives, knowledge about documents and laws for education, pedagogue teacher training and the students’ expectations and the educator’s role. As results, it is possible to say that the point of view of culture is dynamic. In addition to ethnic-racial relations, the issue of inclusion was strongly raised as a form of diversity; the courses provide contact with official and normative documents, and the undergraduates demonstrate basic knowledge of these laws; in addition to theoretical knowledge, the institutions promote activities in other spaces, showing other contexts of education for the pedagogue teacher. Finally, the participants revealed that the course meets their expectations and affirms that education for diversity is fundamental to avoiding prejudices and exclusions in the school and in the classroom, which are living spaces for diverse cultures.