The Portuguese Language teacher in a process of continuing education: Combining reflection and action

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the importance of thinking about the professional development of the teacher as an actor of his/her work, in order to ensure innovative practices in the classroom, under the bias of didactization of genre. It is based on the findings of a cooperative project of continuing education (with support of CAPES/Observatory of Education), which had the notion of language as interaction as its foundational concept. The research was undertaken in light of the principles of Sociodiscursive Interacionism. We developed the educational device of genre didactical projects, inspired by the concepts of didactic sequence and literacy projects, in order to put reading production side by side with written production and take them as effective social practices, focusing on a theme generated by students and teacher altogether. The results showed the importance of the training work as a cooperative and gradual process. They also showed that professional development can be understood as a reconfiguration of individual representations on a particular aspect of the teacher’s work. This development adds to the actoriality to allow the change of identity of a traditional teacher for an innovative teacher, a prerequisite for new practices. This route goes from knowledge to action, from a scientifically backed concept of genre to its didactic transposition which will, thus, allow the production of texts marked by genericity and inserted in meaningful social practices for students.

Keywords: continuing education, didactization of text genres, actoriality.