Meanings produced by of specialized educational services in a continuing education path: work and teaching strategies

Abstract

This work is part of a master's degree research on teachers' meanings about their teaching in special education. Such meanings were analyzed in a training course based on dialogicity and the appreciation of teaching knowledge. For this approach, the work in specialized educational services (SES) was analyzed, and the problem came out: what are the teachers’ meanings about their work and the strategies in SES mediated in a continuing education path? The objective was to understand the meanings of a group of SES teachers in a training course on work and pedagogical strategies. The assumptions of socio-historical psychology and the methodology of meaning cores supported the apprehension of the meanings produced by the teachers. The analysis of the meanings produced by the teachers highlights their understanding about the functionality of the SES, the relationship between their pedagogical practices and theory, their conceptions of teaching intertwined with aspects of Vygotskian defectology, and the conditions for carrying out this work. The investigation pointed out the following situations: contradiction in the valuation between theory and practice, presence of principles of Vygotsky's historical-cultural theory in pedagogical strategies, even if in an unstructured way, and work difficulties that make teachers oscillate between work restricted to the SES room and the implementation of pedagogical strategies that create effective conditions for the inclusion of students with disabilities, which in fact achieve this objective