Memórias afetivas de um professor

Abstract

This memorial is a descriptive, reflective, and critical account of a child’s journey — the son of a locksmith father and a seamstress mother — who was born in the outskirts of a small town in Minas Gerais in the mid-1960s and faced the arduous task of surviving amid the many contradictions the world presented. In the 1970s, school opened new possibilities to the boy who, now a young adolescent, started seeing the world through different eyes — through the eyes of his teachers from the former Primary and Secondary Education. Silence gradually gave way to a voice that, though timid, started to make itself heard, both internally and externally. As an adult, in the late 1980s, joining the university marked the passage from one world to an entirely different one, filled with possibilities and challenges. His perspective changed profoundly through the critical and analytical lens developed by his engagement with geographical science. University life, both in undergraduate and graduate studies, enabled his entry into the world of work as a teacher, interacting with children, teenagers, young people, adults, and the elderly in the role of learners. Dialogue with managers and policymakers in education, urban and regional planning, and tourism — the field he chose for his research — became a pathway into the world of academic research. Over the years, through many schools and choices, his story unfolds — from childhood to adulthood — as a means of recording the affective memories of a teacher, a necessary step toward attaining the position of Full Professor at a Brazilian public university. The narrative of this memorial begins with the street and the memories, described in Chapters 1 and 2. It then recounts his contact with reading and the school environment, from literacy to higher education, which are addressed in Chapter 3. His experiences in graduate studies are presented in Chapters 4, 5, and 6. The account concludes in the educational ground of the Colégio de Aplicação of the Federal University of Uberlândia (CAp UFU), described in Chapter 7, which closes the writing. As a process, the writing navigates between personal, professional, and academic life, intertwined with crossing memories over space and time. The chosen path is one of description, reflection, and critique of my own trajectory, filled with experiences from different moments of life.