“Escola é onde a vida acontece”: A Psicologia Escolar e o desenvolvimento profissional docente em tempos da pandemia de Covid-19

Abstract

Continuing education is a process that occurs daily in various social spaces in which we are involved, developing us professionally and personally throughout our professional career. In this qualitative research, we aim to develop a project of continuing education with teachers from Basic Education in a city in the inland region of Triângulo Mineiro and Alto Paranaíba, based on Critical School and Educational Psychology to stimulate reflections and sharing regarding teaching practice and professional development in a constant process related to institutional, relational, social, political, and subjective factors. In this sense, our general objective was to develop and analyze this proposal for the continuing education for teachers affiliated with a local government in Minas Gerais, seeking contributions to their professional development. As a specific objective, we sought to understand the possibilities of the work of School Psychology from a critical perspective for continuing teacher education during the Covid-19 period. We proposed ten meetings, each lasting three hours, at a municipal institution, with the voluntary participation of ten teachers from the public school system. The meetings took place in the first semester of 2022, between April and August, and were designed to comprehend theoretical discussions and practical activities that involved the collective sharing of teachers' experiences. The themes addressed in the extension course were chosen by us and the teachers based on issues related to education and school daily life, which could contribute to professional teacher development, such as: what is School Psychology; experiences of grief in school; childhood and school complaints; the relationship between students, family, and school; how do we become teachers?; inclusion of refugee children; and intersections between art and education. We analyzed the proposal through the records made in each meeting in the Researcher's Logbook and the Research Assistant's Notebook, as well as the transcriptions of the audio recordings of the meetings. Through content analysis, we identified three analytical axes: 1) "School is where life happens": the different challenges of School and Educational Psychology, 2) "Hey! Teachers are suffering!": after all, is it the system or the teachers who are unwell?" and 3) "In a teacher's gaze, the world fits": the possibilities of coping found by teachers in a context of daily challenges in education. In this way, we built possible dialogues between teacher continuing education, the different challenges experienced in education, and School and Educational Psychology, seeking to create and (re)create transformative practices in Education. The theoretical discussions and experiences mediated by artistic resources proved to be powerful in enabling us to rethink practices and understand the historicity of school relationships. They also contributed to the professional and personal development of teachers in the face of the appropriation of institutional space for collectively constructed education. We emphasize the importance of Law 13.935/19 for the inclusion of school psychologists and social workers in the public basic education system, as well as the urgency of continuing education processes for these professionals, in order to (re)construct an education and a society that are depathologizing and demedicalizing.