The discourse of more practice for a better teacher education

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to discuss how practice has been signified in the disputes in the field of teacher education in the Brazilian scenario. We adopted as theoretical and practical strategy the discursive perspective, based on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Discourse Theory. The focus is on the discursivity of Educational Laws and legal Resolutions of the last three Brazilian National Curricular Guidelines aimed at the training of Basic Education’s teachers at a higher level, enacted in the years 2002, 2015 and 2019. We argue about the nodal points that have sustained the maintenance of the discourse of more practice for a better teacher education in three curricular policies elaborated and promulgated during governments of distinct political-party tendencies. These nodal points are: teachers’ graduation courses with their own identity; higher level education for all teachers; bringing together Higher Education Institutions and Basic Education Systems; and proper association between theory and practice. The final considerations highlight that the policy texts that composed the corpus of analysis were discussed thought as part of a social milieu that is all political and, therefore, such texts were considered as resulting from the great arena of disputes that is the social.  The bet on investigating such disputes implies creating a grammar of its own with the claim of discussing the relations between discourse and discourse production in a non-dichotomous and non-essentialist way, considering the social not as a whole that is fragmented, but as a plurality of discursive elements that constitute themselves in political action.