Tornar-se professor na licenciatura em Ciências Biológicas: a identidade profissional docente como configuração situada e interdependente

Abstract

This thesis investigates how professional teaching identity is configured and sustained in the Biological Sciences teaching degree program in the face of the formative tensions inherent to the course, historically marked by formative arrangements that subordinate teaching in favor of the biologist profession. Structured in the multipaper format, it articulates three investigative movements. The first consists of a theoretical essay that discusses professional teaching identity as the mobilizing instance of teaching practices, based on the characterization of the formative fragilities that distance the preservice teacher from teaching, grounded in the premise that teacher education must be built within the profession and proposing a new professional culture for the program. The second corresponds to a systematic review of Brazilian scientific production between 2013 and 2023, conducted through the PRISMA method and the thematic synthesis proposed by Thomas and Harden (2008), which analyzed 38 articles and identified that the field recognizes the multidimensionality of teaching identity but does not theoretically articulate the relationships of interdependence among its constitutive planes. The third movement presents empirical research developed through Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2009), with Symbolic Interactionism (Blumer, 1969) as the source of the notion of sensitizing concept and Erikson's psychosocial framework (1968) to interrogate identity processes. Three focus groups were conducted with graduating preservice teachers from Federal Higher Education Institutions in the North and Northeast of Brazil, enrolled in the Supervised Curricular Teaching Internships. The analysis made it possible to delineate a substantive theory, according to which professional teaching identity is constituted as a Situated and Interdependent Configuration, in which the preservice teacher mobilizes six identificatory elements articulated through three Psychosocial Constructs of Integration, the Dynamics of Temporal Navigation, Relationality, and Regulation, which are realized across three Dimensions, the scenarios of Temporal, Political, and Subjective tension. The thesis argues that teaching is not mobilized by the prior possession of attributes, but by identity exercised as agency, which the preservice teacher elaborates in a continuous psychosocial process of permanence. The contributions reach the theoretical, methodological, and practical planes, proposing a shift of the analytical lens from deficit to permanence and offering the field of Science Education an analytical model anchored in the experience of preservice teachers in the investigated context.