Formação de professores e saberes docentes: Trajetória e preocupações de uma pesquisadora da docência-uma entrevista com ruth mercado

Abstract

The text derives from an interview with Mexican researcher Ruth Mercado Maldonado conducted in October 2013, and brings significant contributions to the educational field by dealing with contemporary themes in the light of the professional experience of an internationally renowned scholar. A professor and researcher at the Departamento de Investigaciones Educativas del Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (DIE-CINVESTAV), Dr Ruth Mercado has been in contact with Brazilian researchers since the 1980s, discussing with them themes involving ethnography and teacher education. The ethnographic approach, based on the articulation between empirical and conceptual works, allows her, drawing from the thinking of Agnes Heller, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Lev Vygotsky, among others, to produce her own theoretical construct about teachers knowledges, seen by her as part of a historical process, thereby revealing the conceptions of a researcher that seeks to understand the perspective of the other, and to distance herself from judgmental and prescriptive outlooks so common in the pedagogical field. In this interview Dr Ruth Mercado stimulates us to reflect about current issues in the field of initial and continued teacher education: the universitization process and its implications, the role of instructors, the relations between university culture and school culture. Her reflections about the history of the teaching profession in Mexico and of the creation of professional master programs in different countries offer important contributions to the educational community in Latin America. The reading of this interview amounts therefore to an invitation to the reflection about the challenges that the university and its professionals face in the construction of teacher education proposals that are adequate to the needs, demands and characteristics specific to those that work in basic education.