Motivational practices and learning control in literacy

Abstract

This work consists of investigating one literacy teacher’s diversified educational actions and their relations to the students’ performance at school, aiming to understand the practices, focusing on elements that are part of the school context. In order to reach those objectives, interviews and participant observation wer used. The analysis of the classroom daily routine involved the study of the motivational practices in order to identify the relations that contributed to the learning control in literacy. In this perspective, other data were organized to study this control, such as the nature of the activity, the nature of the teacher’s and the students’ participation, evaluation practices and (re)teaching situations. The results allowed us to identify that the pedagogical practices are contradictory, because they were organized in order to simplify the understanding, to eliminate the difficulties, doubts and develop certain abilities, but did not offer many development situations, in such a manner as the student could exceed the patterns established by the teacher and present different results. We concluded that the features of the school performance have a significant dependency on the teacher’s practices. We also realized, when analyzing the school daily routine, that the attempts to homogenize and classify the performance are still part of the reality of the pedagogical practices in the schools, spreading, thus, a control that leads the students to react in certain ways. The investigation of the variety of educational actions evidences the importance of the teacher’s professional development, whose process of professionalization would embrace the investment in the literacy teacher’s identity.