The development of theoretical thinking in professional education: In search of the dialectical sublation of practice

Abstract

The conditions of a culture of labour permeated by technical and technological advances tend to be seized by technical training institutions as a way to legitimize the denial, to the worker, of historically produced theoretical knowledge. Aiming at contributing to overcoming this reality, the objective of the research reported in this article was to investigate the development of theoretical thinking of students of a private school of technological and vocational education, during the elaboration of technical projects. In accordance to the cultural-historical theory, it is understood that the overcoming of learning based only on the representations and classifications of the objects allows the appropriation of scientific knowledge essential to the development of students' theoretical thinking. As methodological procedure, training experiment was adopted and data collection sought to follow the movement of learning of the students through audio records and access to their written productions at different moments of the project elaboration process. The analysis of the data took place through three isolates: reality, contradiction and consciousness. The conclusions reveal that the organization of project teaching and the orientation provided by the teacher in a professional technical course may lead to theoretical thinking with a view to an integral formation of the subject that takes labour as an ontological principle in the organization of teaching by enabling the student to have contact with reality and opportunities to reflect on contradictions, as well as to become aware of the object of study in the midst of the practical and theoretical solutions to the problem.