Mentoras de professoras iniciantes da educação infantil: enfrentando e superando tensões no processo de ensinar a ensinar

Abstract

We sought to analyze the processes of tension evidenced in three experienced teachers, Early Childhood Education (ECE) mentors of beginning teachers (BT), participants. Tension can be characterized as opposition of ideas, feelings and actions and decision-making and actions of confrontations to these circumstances. These processes occurred from situations that provoked doubts, dilemmas, disagreements, conflicts, and difficulties throughout their participation in the Hybrid Mentoring Program (HMP). The HMP (2017-2020) - the investigative context of this study - refers to a constructive-collaborative research-intervention, funded by FAPESP, coordinated by UFSCar researchers. This program helped Basic Education BT (ECE, Elementary Education, Youth and Adult Education) with up to five years of experience, through mentoring actions, to deal with the typical difficulties of this career stage. The support offered to the PIs happened through hybrid formative actions developed by experienced teachers, autonomous and prepared to be mentors. Then, they participated in an initial and continued training throughout their performance in PHM. The theoretical basis of this thesis dialogues with notions related to learning and professional development, third space, professional conversations, mentoring (Mizukami, Reali, Zeichner, Loughran, Vaillant, Marcelo, among others) and with the Bioecological Theory of Human Development (BTHD), discussed by Bronfenbrenner (1996) and Tudge (2008). Data was provided by written narratives of the three ECE mentors recorded in diaries, activities in the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), conversations on WhatsApp, online questionnaire and research reports, as well as individual interviews conducted during their activities in the HMP. From the identification of the dilemmas, conflicts, doubts, difficulties, etc. faced by each of the participants, episodes were selected regarding i) tensions experienced during the initial training process of the mentors in the HMP; ii) individual tensions arising from the lack of mastery over certain knowledge, divergence of pedagogical conception between mentor-BT and acting in the pandemic of COVID-19; iii) similar tensions faced by the three mentors associated with the difficulty of identifying the demands of the BT and in planning mentoring practices related to the NATIONAL COMMON CURRICULUM BASE and in the context of the pandemic of COVID-19. The results indicate that the tensions experienced by the ECE mentors arose as a result of the peculiar characteristics of the HMP, the very nature of the act of teaching to teach, issues arising from mentoring practices, and even aspects more external to the program. In all these cases, we observed the mobilization of the mentors - who put themselves in the position of learners - so that, while they sought alternatives to help their BT, they were also involved in a process of recognizing and overcoming their difficulties. Despite the discomfort caused by the tensions, the mentors were resilient in facing these situations and building new learning about being a mentor. The formative activities offered in the HMP as well as the collaborative exchanges with the mentor, educators and researchers favored the mentors' professional development.