Continuous education and its relation with teachers’ professional development

what the brazilian research points out

Abstract

Continuous education is intertwined with professional development as part of the permanent education of teachers in a life cycle continuous process. Based on this perspective, this qualitative research developed by means of document analysis and literature review aimed to identify how the relation between continuous education and teachers’ professional development has been reported in dissertations and theses produced in Brazil. To achieve our objective, we surveyed the Thesis and Dissertation Repository of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel and the portal of the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology to access dissertations and theses produced between 2013 and 2019 linked to education postgraduate programs. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria and reading titles and abstracts, 9 theses and 25 dissertations were found, whose data was analyzed using content analysis. We observed that the studies surveyed have not established a direct correlation between the continuous education terms and teachers’ professional development. Based on the analysis carried out, we concluded that verticalized continuous education, with a prescriptive characteristic and aiming to impose standardized methodologies result in a gap in the perspective of integrating the education process to the teachers’ professional development. On the other hand, continuous education courses that take into account the school reality, linked to the teachers’ needs and realities, which enable dialogue and interaction of teachers in different moments of their careers, establishing relations between their initial education and the teaching practice cater for the teachers’ professional development perspective.