Sentidos de docência em história em disputa: uma análise de concursos públicos para professores da educação básica

Abstract

Public teacher recruitment examinations are important tools within educational systems because, by selecting teachers for public schools, they can strengthen teacher professionalization by promoting teacher insertion and teacher professional development. In this study, these examinations are understood as forms of assessment, and from a post-foundational perspective (Burity, 2008; Mendonça & Rodrigues, 2014), this means that their design produces discourses that interpellate meanings of teaching. The calls for applications and examinations delimit the knowledge considered valid and necessary for professional practice, configuring meanings of teaching through the valorization of particular forms of teacher knowledge (Tardif, 2000; Shulman, 1986; Monteiro, 2007), experience, training, etc. The aim of this research was to investigate the meanings of teaching produced, contested, and hegemonized through public recruitment examinations for History teachers, understanding that these meanings are not natural but rather the result of discursive disputes that, in spaces such as these examinations, undergo provisional stabilizations regarding how History teachers should be and what they should know. The analysis was based on the most recent calls for applications and examinations conducted by the Brazilian states and the Federal District, as well as on a more in-depth examination of 14 of these 27 exams, focusing on aspects such as the assessment instruments adopted, the distribution of scores among them, the most common question formats, and the most recurrent themes. The main finding of this research was that these meanings of teaching have been remarkably similar across the examinations analyzed, despite the diversity of examining boards and the absence of legislation regulating these selection processes in greater detail. Drawing on the contributions of Chantal Mouffe (2015), we understand that these shared presences and absences have shaped—and are shaped by—an evaluative politics. Some characteristics of this assessment policy include the unavoidable use of multiple-choice examinations, which concentrate the highest scores and possess the greatest exclusionary power; greater prioritization of academic background over professional experience; the near absence of practical examinations; and the predominance of knowledge derived from the disciplinary knowledge in multiple-choice assessments.