Professores excelentes: Convergências, tensões e desafios nas políticas de formação e carreira docente na contemporaneidade

Abstract

This thesis presents the convergences, the challenges, and the tensions in the educational policies aimed at teacher training and career in contemporaneity. The research was supported by documents of the World Bank in order to understand how their guidelines articulate and unfold in the Brazilian context by analyzing the printed media, of the Magazines Nova Escola and Gestão Escolar of 2008-­2017. The research was oriented by the perspective of the combined theories of critical-­historical references and the studies of Bauman (2001) and Santos (1999, 2010), an emerging paradigm, Ball and Bowe’s Policy Cycle (1992) and Ball (2015b) that support the understanding of politics as discourse. Elements emerge from the global arena that make pressure on other arenas to adequate to the prescriptions of the globalization, the neoliberalism, the managerialism, and the new public management in the educational field. Five documents were catalogued in order to learn the World Bank’s policy guidelines: (1) Professores Excelentes: como melhorar a aprendizagem dos estudantes na América Latina e no Caribe (2014, 2015), (2) Achieving world-­class education in Brazil: the next agenda (2012), (3) Skills for the 21st Century in Latin America and the Caribbean (2012), (4) Making schools work (2011) and (5) Improving teaching and learning through effective incentives (2005). Studying the Brazilian print media showed that a network of policies is organized by Brazilian entrepreneurs in tune with the principles of the new philanthropy gathered in nonprofit foundations around the educational reforms. The documents analyzed, the magazines and the literature of the area were organized as to make sense of the discursive production of educational policies in contemporaneity. The analyzes of the magazines and texts show a discursive production that was articulated into three sessions: (1) highlighting the new school management, (2) external assessment: establishing a culture, and (3) remodeling teacher training and career: the top teacher. The investigation shed light on how narratives are established in order to stand out to get unanimity among others in the perspective to institute a managing view that solves all issues – salvationist, of large-­scale assessment as synonyms with quality, of knowledge as a utilitarian and performing principle, of constant innovation from new technologies and of human capital as investment to the country’s economy. The combination of these convergences added of the tensions and disputes of narratives on teachers, their training and their careers imply adhering to policies focused on economy of knowledge and on constituting permanent and abundant human capital. Therefore, the theoretical reference built here instigates one to consider the regional and local movements that operate disputes in different fields of educational policies towards non-­convergent experiences. These alternatives pass through the constitution of a political space to turn the de jure citizen into a de facto citizen.