Caminhos iniciais da docência: atuação dos professores de Geografia na educação básica.

Abstract

This dissertation deals with the path taken by Geography graduates until they become teachers in Basic Education, the main challenges and facilities at the beginning of their teaching career. This research was carried out with a group of 12 teachers who graduated from the Teacher Training Center (CFP), who currently teach Geography in public and private schools in the states of Paraíba and Ceará. Thus, we chose as a general objective to analyze how the adaptation process of Geography teachers occurs at the beginning of their teaching activity, and whether this compromises their teaching performance and the construction of geographic knowledge in the Basic Education classroom. It is important to initially highlight that the teacher goes through some challenges in his process of adapting to the work space, the difficulty of entering the world of work, the lack of physical structure at the school, pedagogical support, low salaries, reduced workload timetable for the Geography subject and the mandatory implementation of a basically technical curriculum that does not value the student's critical/reflective development. To understand these issues, we adopted the following specific objectives: a- Discuss teacher training and Geography teaching in Brazil; b- Reflect on teacher training at the beginning of their careers, the difficulties faced by Geography teachers; c- Identify the areas of activity in teaching Geography for Beginning Teachers and the effects on their work as a teacher. We adopted qualitative research as a methodology using a semi-open questionnaire. The research subjects are 12 teachers trained between 2015 and 2023 and who have worked for up to three years as a Geography teacher in the states of Paraíba and Ceará. Data collection took place between April and December 2023. The data analysis technique was thematic content analysis, observing the frequency of responses. The main results of this research emphasize that: teachers have greater difficulties with student indiscipline, student lack of interest in the subject of geography, in seeking new methodologies for their classes, as many focus on expository classes, some teachers also have difficulties in some geography content. As perspectives, this research contributes to the resizing of actions that can contribute to the practice of geography teachers at the beginning of their careers in the regions studied, and can also serve as a basis for investigations in other contexts, considering that the lack of experience in the environment school was the main result found here, but it may be presented differently in other studies.