The in-service teacher education: the reflective proposal in debate

Abstract

This article presents some of the findings of a study conducted with teachers from the public school system of São Paulo (capital), which take part in in-service teacher education groups. The purpose is to give visibility to the effects that the concrete formative practice has been producing upon teachers professionality. The article highlights in particular the vicissitudes experienced by the group when exposed to a contemporary modality of teacher education based on the model of reflective education. The ideas developed here belong to the conceptual framework of Institutional Psychology. From this theoretical framework, the text deals with the assumption that the recent paradigms in teacher education, when worked through concrete formative practices, promote new possibilities of self-experience to the teachers, endowing them at the present time with new images of subjectivity - reflective teacher, autonomous teacher, research teacher. Within institutionalized relations, the experience of those images is metabolized by the teachers, who produce a peculiar form of reflection not envisaged in the agenda of teacher education programs. Teachers, entered in concrete practices of in-service education, produce a particular kind of reflection that escapes from the objects defined in the formative design and from the reflective borders traced a priori. The tangible reflection in the teachers speeches tells of the clash between this agent and her attributed professional place, problematizing the "must be" of his craft nowadays.