The pedagogy course and the universitarization of teaching in Brazil: from the disputes over teachers’ education to its deprofessionalisation

Abstract

This article focuses on the Brazilian process of raising the formation of teachers working at the first years of basic education to the level of higher education, problematizing their qualification as a classic case of universitarization and proposing a way of characterizing it that we deem to be more precise and proficuous for the debate about the relations between the formation and professionalisation of those teachers. Based on literature review, it explores the cultural dimension and the symbolic struggles mobilized in that process, so as to characterize it as a sui generis case of universitarization, largely conducted by nonuniversity institutions, and implemented through an atypical movement of institutional transfer – to the Pedagogy course –, which did not take into account the pre-existing formative structures and did not absorb them, as is more commonly the case in processes of universitarization. The article concludes that such universitarization was marked by processes of autonomization and of deprofessionalisation of teachers’ education, particularly due to the sociocultural effacement imposed to the teaching profession. Contrary to the expectations that legitimized it in the educational field, such universitarization conducted through institutional transfer is shown to be incompatible with the objectives of professionalisation of the teaching profession, which prescribe, among other factors, the increase of the control exerted by teachers over the processes concerning their work, among which is included the task of educating the future generations of teachers.