Puxando fios da memória: a invenção de uma professora pesquisadora

Abstract

This memorial fulfills requirements for the promotion of “class-IV associate professor” to that of “full professor”, according to Ordinance 982/2013 of the Ministry of Education, regulated by the article 7 in the resolution 3/2017 of the management council at Uberlândia’s Federal University. For career promotion, the legislation allows choosing between a memorial of academic-professional trajectory or a thesis on a topic of interest. I chose the memorial, with full awareness that it could be challenging and laborious. Writing the memorial, however, would be an opportunity to dialogue with the academic community within the scope of self-reflection on teaching and management, research and extension. I did not want a monologue text. I wanted it to be a dialogue as driving part of the self-assessment. I present my memories and other people’s memories (collective memories) as a form of learning. In considering myself in relation to the university four pillars, I tried to present points that seemed more pertinent to me in a spin of thirty-five years of working professionally. All was seen as opportunities to learn more, including with mistakes. Pulling threads from memory was not an easy task, but was significant, for it placed me in relation to past and present time and to future. The difficulty was to make choices: give priorities, select what was frustration and setback and no longer is now, given maturity and discoveries, as a research professor. Thus, the memorial allowed me to review theoretical and methodological paths, experiences, especially the encounter with the history of education and the research in the area. The methodology for writing this memorial followed resolution 3/2017. It goes from facts prior to my birth to facts regarding this memorial. From my life, I recover pre-birth facts related to education and my school ingenuity, from elementary school to post-doctoral studies. I tried to develop the idea of me as a female educator and researcher always ready to fight for the public education. I grew up with this spirit at home. My father was involved in school building and maintenance; my mother was a school principal who in the 1970s committed her management to the establishing of preschool and special education classrooms, but without the legal support. I close the memorial in 2022m right at the end of Covid-19 pandemic and in the midst of a struggle for the quality of public education. To a large extent, this memorial writing has the narrative tone, but it does not escape the reflexive-analytical tone here and there. In a general level, it was structured according to the teaching, management, research and extension pillars; especially the research I’ve been developing for the past fifteen years at UFU. Each pillar appears as chapters, but they permeate the memorial in almost its entirety. I conclude, highlighting that I feel myself in full conditions of making more movements in my pedagogical-intellectual project as a researcher and teacher. As Freire says, his sense of waiting should be consistent with the verb to hope: “to stand up, to hope is to go after, to hope is to build, to hope is not to give up! To hope is to carry forward, hope is to join with others to do otherwise”. As to my case, I’d say to hope is to believe.