Programa Híbrido de Mentoria: contribuições e tensões evidenciadas por uma professora mentora, relacionadas a seu desenvolvimento profissional

Abstract

This research is a doctoral thesis, delimited within the area of ​​teacher education, focusing on the training of mentors (who are trainers of other teachers). The group of professors from the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) belonging to the Teacher Training and Other Educational Agents (FPOAE) research line developed a teacher mentoring program, the Hybrid Mentoring Program (PHM), which lasted from 2017 to 2020. In it, experienced teachers received training so that they could act as mentors, training teachers at the beginning of their careers (feminine terms are used because practically all participants in the mentoring program were female). This mentoring and training initiative provided relevant information and data to conduct research on the training of trainers, which in this case refers to the mentors participating in the program. Among the activities of the mentors (experienced teachers) in the PHM program, the mentoring actions of one of the trainers with the beginning teacher she accompanied and assisted throughout her participation in the program stood out. Based on the premise that teacher mentoring, as an initiative to induce teaching, can contribute to the professional development of both beginning and experienced teachers, this research seeks to answer the following question (which unfolds into two): what elements can be evidenced in the professional development of an experienced teacher in the learning process of being a mentor promoted in the PHM program? In this regard, how do the contributions and tensions (doubts/dilemmas/difficulties/gaps) impact this development and learning process of mentoring? Given these questions, the overall objective is to understand how the professional development of a mentor participating in the program occurs. Regarding the specific objectives, the research seeks to: understand the relationship and processes involved in the insertion/performance of mentoring practice (the participation of a mentor in a teacher mentoring program); understand the construction of formative practices and their relationship with the promotion of professional development (focused on mentoring); understand whether the mentoring model adopted (and/or the format of the mentoring program) had implications for the training and development of the mentor participating in the research (and how these implications occurred). To answer this question, a case study was conducted, analyzing data from the interactions, professional conversations, and formative practices developed between a mentor and the beginning teacher she accompanied in the program. The interactions, mentoring practices, and professional conversations took place over two and a half years. The research is characterized as a case study due to the particularities that occurred throughout the interactions, which make the case unique among those developed throughout the program. The selected data portions will be analyzed in light of the ideas of authors who address the professional development of teachers and trainers. A dialogue was established between the data and authors such as: Shulman, Loughran, Korthagen, Reali, Tancredi, Mizukami, Marcelo, Vaillant, Orland-Barack, Zeichner, Schoenfeld, Clandinin and Connelly, Cochran-Smith and Lytle, among others. The results of the analyzed data (which were elaborated by the mentor-beginner teacher dyad) indicate that the mentor teacher's participation in the program favored her professional development as a trainer, allowing her to build a new professional identity (mentor), also indicating that the construction of formative and mentoring practices, as well as the establishment and unfolding of professional conversations with the beginner, stimulated the mentor to build pedagogical content knowledge focused on training (the teaching of teaching), insofar as she had to mobilize the knowledge from her teaching and training knowledge bases.