O trabalho dos professores na escola e a busca por excelência: um estudo sobre mecanismos de avaliação

Abstract

Brazilian education, especially in the school context, is going through different evaluation processes, mainly through tests done with students from different learning levels. As a result, there is a belief that excellence is obtained when the evaluation goals and criteria are achieved. However, the evaluation mechanisms are enmeshed with ideologies which orientate and organize them and which can generate a blinding of real, legitimizing certain relations as true. In the process of this reality, teachers work becomes one of the main factors to reproduce relations or to promote transformations. In this sense, searching for excellence in the teachers work is guided by the senses these professionals give to what they consider as excellence. Therefore, this study, with a qualitative approach, examines deeply the reflections about these issues from the speech of six teachers. The context is Politécnico School of Federal University of Santa Maria, which is renowned in the regions for its performance in evaluation processes, especially Highschool National Examination. It was an option to interview teachers from this school in order to know the senses they produce about excellence at work, considering their relation with the evaluation mechanisms. In the first part of data production there was a questionnaire and, after the analysis, the considerations were taken for discussion in an interlocution group. The interlocution permitted the subjects to review, analyse and reformulate their own speech. The data analysis process was supported in a proposal of Content Analysis, whilst the theoretical perspective for the production as a whole is dialectics. Thereby, besides deepening the scientific knowledge, the study provided possibilities to transform the pedagogical praxis and the teachers participation into the (re)cognition of the excellence concept from evaluation mechanisms influence. In the midst of several requirements from the mechanisms, teachers find ways of preserving their desires of a human being full education, developing their work as authentic professionals.