As dores emocionais docentes: hermenêutica dos processos formativos na autocompreensão de professores universitários

Abstract

The present, thesis entitled “Emotional pains in teachers: hermeneutics of formative processes in the self-understanding of university professors”, was developed in the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Santa Maria in the Research Line Teaching, knowledge and professional development. The main element of the study proposal is to recognize emotional pain, translated into anxiety, stress, depression and other symptoms, and the contribution of teaching knowledge to the hermeneutic (re)configuration of self-understanding of university professors, based on neuroscientific investigations of Antonio Damásio and Baruch Espinosa. With this objective, we chose to investigate the following problematic question: In what sense does the self-understanding of university professors about their emotional pain, which put their emotional health at risk, contributes (or not) to the pedagogical (re)configuration of their formative processes? The methodological design of the research favors the qualitative approach of a hermeneutic nature, which involves listening to involved subjects, having as reference the characteristics of the symbolic hermeneutics of Andrés Ortiz Osés. Hermeneutics is referenced in order to be able to recognize, in the narratives of university professors, the emotional pains, as well as the contribution of teaching knowledge to the (re)configuration of pedagogical self-clarification. To illustrate this path, the Greek tragedy “The Bacchae” is used in order to explore its hermeneutic potential for interpretation and meaning for the understanding of the human relationship with its inner nature. This is how the discussion joins the investigations of neuroscientist Antonio Damásio, whose intuitions point to the centrality of emotions in rational life. Emotions make human beings unique and enable them to read a repertoire of the feelings involved in the action, created from the interaction of body and mind. He proposes that the emotions of pain, suffering, or anticipated pleasure were the motivating forces of culture, the mechanisms that propelled the human intellect and monitored the success or failure of cultural inventions. Another important contribution to this study was the thought of Baruch Espinosa and his concepts of affection, freedom and servitude. Other theoretical contributions were essential and all listed in the theoretical framework. The chosen research technique was narrative and, in it, four professors have been heard via google meet. In these narratives, their conflicts are present, whose possible interpretation, at this time and with the chosen theoretical contributions, were caused by the inconsistency between culture and the possibility of self-management of life, insecurity in the face of non-recognition of oneself and the other, vanity expressed in the teacher's self-image and the discredit of the contribution of pedagogy to the realization of a disruptive work in relation to beliefs. Thus, knowledge of self-clarification is proposed as a component of the organization of teacher training processes. It is formed by the knowledge of articulation between reason and emotion, sense of self, self-determination and self-management of life, deconstruction and (re)signification of concepts and beliefs and pedagogical self-clarification.