Teaching work in multi-grade classes: different ways of understanding difference in school

Abstract

This article presents discussions and results of a research that aimed to understand how the teachers of the multi-series schools conceive the differences and how they deal with them in the classroom. In the course of the study, we used qualitative research based on the (auto) biographical approach. In this way, I take the narratives as a device of investigation, because I understand that the narratives of formationprofession bring with them elements overloaded with subjectivities and, therefore, favor productions of meanings about the formation. To this end, we have used the formative workshops, inspired by the biographical workshops, with seven teachers who work in multigrade classes of rural schools, in the county of Várzea do Poço, in the interior of Bahia-Brazil. We can perceive with this research that the differences are being demarcated specifically by the social factor in which their students are and by the learning difficulties that some of them present, triggering the perception that the difference is still associated with the absence of normalizing elements of the subjects. Thus, the study evidenced that the differences are taken as something segregating the subjects, in which the solution is to homogenize the subjects, in a perspective of not recognizing the differences in the cultural and social dimensions.