Interação entre formadores de professores que ensinam matemática em um ambiente virtual de aprendizagem

Abstract

In the literature concerned with information and communication technologies, Distance Education has come to occupy an ever increasing space in the arena of teacher education, with attention to teachers of different subject area and including the in-service education of teachers who teacher mathematics. In particular, there has been a growth in courses with emphasis the use of software associated with mathematics teaching. However, Distance Education for the initial training of elementary school teachers is still very recent and deserves special attention, given that have been very few students related to this modality of education. This work aims to analyze the processes of teaching and learning in the Distance Education modality and the possibilities and limitations of a course in which the tutor has a central role: to support the students in the construction of geometrical knowledge. Given that these teachers are not always specialists in the field of mathematics or, that when they are, they do not already have a very developed vision of the processes of teaching and learning to elementary school students, it seems likely that they may experience some difficulty in accompanying the learning progress of their students. The general objective of this study is to analyze the discursive interactions realized in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) between university lecturers responsible for the geometry module and the tutors responsible for accompanying the students of Distance Education Initial Teacher Education course to prepare elementary school teachers, offered by the State University of Maringá. The study aims to verify if this interaction contributed, and in what forms, to the work to be developed by the tutors with the students of the course in relation to knowledge of school geometry. Considering that the virtual scenario and bring new types of difficulties to the understanding of facts, concepts and activities, when compared to the activities realized in the traditional classroom, a qualitative methodology was uses, and the analysis of the interactions was developed on the basis of elements from the French discourse analysis, in which discourse in investigated through dialogic interaction between two or more individuals. In this project, the interaction occurred through the tools of an online platform. The question which guided the study were 1) What are the difficulties in this interaction? Do all the teachers make use of the platform? And how? 2) What does this interaction suggest about the geometrical knowledge of the tutors? What are the consequences of this knowledge for their role as collaborator in the education of future teachers? And what are their understandings of the support material? 3) The interaction which occurred enabled the tutors to resolves their doubts about the geometry content? To respond to these questions transcripts from chats, forums and semi-structured interviews in which the tutor participated were analyzed. The results point to a series of problems related to, amongst others, technical difficulties in used the online platform, as well as other problems associated with the geometrical knowledge of the tutors, and their preparation to enact in this teaching modality and through the types of communication permissible with the tools of the platform.