Empoderamento docente: reflexões sobre as representações sociais no contexto da pandemia da Covid-19

Abstract

This dissertation is an investigation about teacher empowerment in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, considering the educational scenario in Brazil with remote teaching and the use of technological resources. The general objective of the research is to understand the social representations of teachers of Professional Education of a public educational institution, about teacher empowerment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The specific objectives are to identify the central core and peripheral system of these social representations and to identify the social representations of these participants and their challenges during this period. The interpretations about empowerment are based on Freire and Shor and Short and Rinehart, and the concept is from Perkins and Zimmerman, who consider empowerment to be that which unites the common good with the individual good and the political and social environment without dismembering them. The theoretical and methodological reference adopted is Moscovici's Theory of Social Representations and Abric's structural approach. For data collection we used an online questionnaire with open and closed questions and the Free Word Association Technique. The data analysis has a mixed approach with the support of the Theory of Social Representations and the use of EVOC and IRaMuTeQ software and content analysis from Bardin's perspective. Through the EVOC, the evocations about teacher empowerment are verified, and with the help of IRaMuTeQ, the teaching challenges in the pandemic period are highlighted. In the results, the central nucleus in the Vergès quadrant brings the words "knowledge" and "recognition", determining the teachers' social representations. The words "commitment" and "resilience" are in the first periphery, the word "irrelevant" is in the second periphery, and the word "power" is in the contrast zone. In the similarity analysis and word cloud the terms "learner", "remote teaching", "work", "pandemic moment", "class", "period" stand out. In the maximum tree the community of the word "learner" highlights the words "learning", "faculty learning" and "student learning". In the qualitative analysis of the narratives there is a mixture of knowledge acquisition, effort, and hard work with suffering, fear, and insecurity. The speeches bring challenges related to sudden changes, but with positive results for students and 11 teachers. The study suggests that the difficulties reported were driving forces for the empowerment of teachers, and that the social representations found in the central nucleus contributed to minimize the negative impacts of the pandemic on this group of participants. At the end of the dissertation, we emphasize the possibility of the terms "resilience" and "commitment" migrating from the first periphery to the central core. One of the possibilities for this migration to occur is the implementation of teacher education activities that bring to light the identified social representations and promote debates and discussions on the subject. The knowledge of the social representations on the theme, associated with continuing education, has the potential to contribute to the empowerment of teachers and, possibly, to redefine the professional exercise.