A neurociência aplicada à educação especial: em foco a formação dos professores do atendimento educacional especializado

Abstract

Historically, Special Education has been presented in different arrangements, carried out in different places, with different purposes in terms of care for students with disabilities. Such arrangements were intertwined with socially constructed conceptions of disability, presenting different approaches, which influenced in social, cognitive and psychological development of these students. In contemporary times, education follows international aspirations stated in international movements for human rights which, in Brazil, resulted in the proposal of the National Policy on Special Education in the Perspective of Inclusive Education in 2008, which proposed Specialized Educational Assistance (AEE) as support for educational inclusion of students with disabilities in the regular school system. In this context, specialist teachers in Special Education who perform AEE assume an important role in educational inclusion of these students, deserving special attention with regard to their continuing education. In this way, it is important for these teachers to understand the brain processes of learning pointed out by Neuroscience, which can facilitate and optimize this process, in the development of skills or resources, enabling the conscious choice of the best didactic-pedagogical strategy, aiming at cognitive and psychosocial development of students. Therefore, Neuroscience states the importance of the richness of stimuli found in the varied environment of regular school, correlating learning with the need for frequent adaptability. It also presents the four facilitating supports of learning that are exercised by the development of executive functions, which make neuroscientific knowledge important for pedagogical performance in AEE. The present research, configured as exploratory and qualitative, concerns in action research carried out in a municipal education network located in the northeast of São Paulo State and aimed to analyze the possibilities of a training course with AEE teachers, develop the theoretical construction and expand pedagogical strategies based on the principles of Neuroscience. As part of the action research, a continuing education course was applied in 2021 to professionals specializing in Special Education, with twelve teachers from the multifunctional resource rooms who perform the AEE. During the course, open questionnaires were used through Google forms, in order to verify previous knowledge of the participants, as well as the learning that took place during the continuing education course. Due to Covid-19 pandemic, the course took place through Google Meet using training moments in synchronous and asynchronous setup. The results derived from the content analysis proposed by Bardin (2004) in which they pointed out that the participants expanded their knowledge about neuroscience and its contributions to the learning of students with disabilities, expanding the possibilities of didactic-pedagogical strategies as interventional actions for fundamental development of students. During the course, they also expanded the reflections on neuroscientific elements of learning, attributing importance to the development of the supports pointed out by Neuroscience, and considerably adding to the understanding of the development of executive functions and the neurobiological modification that occurred in the learning process.