Teaching work instrumentalized Brazilian teacher training policy: A historical and theoretical-philosophical approach

Abstract

This text deals with policy/management of teacher training in Brazil and is anchored in the results of the research project, “Policy/management of teacher training in the perspective of the philosophy of praxis: Tension between the economic-corporate and ethical-political perspectives”. The research aimed to explain the instrumentalization of the teaching work in the teacher training process from a historical and theoretical-philosophical point of view, without disregarding the theoretical-practical existence of the philosophy of praxis and of the emancipatory formative perspective based on the ethical-political principles. In achieving the proposed objective, we used the historical-methodological and critical-dialectical frame of reference, and the project was developed through bibliographical and empirical-documentary research. In this article, we aim to discuss the fundamentals of the training policy/management of Brazilian teacher education in the instrumental perspective, as well as their relationship with the teaching work. The research revealed that teacher education in Brazil tended to occur from the instrumental perspective, with the prioritization of the technical-pedagogical dimension in relation to the political-cultural prioritization. However, the instrumentalisation of the teaching work is not linear or devoid of contradictions among the forces that have been fighting for the education and training of teachers with a substantive, libertarian and emancipatory perspective.