Narrative records in the teaching practicum: the other-oriented role of references and citations

ABSTRACT

Framed within discussions on internship supervision practices in teacher education programs, this study aims to interpret pedagogy students’ discursive construction of written narratives of their experiences in elementary education schools, with an emphasis on the use of citations and references. Firstly, this text presents the foundations and principles that justify the use of school-based narratives as a training tool and describes the work conducted with groups enrolled in the Supervised Internship in Brazilian Early Years of Elementary Education at a public university in São Paulo. Subsequently, from a dialogical perspective on language, it analyzes the narrative productions of two students who completed the teaching practicum during the COVID-19 pandemic context. The study highlights the other-oriented role of references and citations in the texts of pre-service teachers, emphasizing how these resources foster deeper engagement with reflections related to their school experiences. It concludes by underscoring the importance of spaces for dialogue and production of meanings that provide a broader consideration of the complexities of teaching.

Keywords:
Teacher Education; Curriculum Internship; Pedagogical Narratives; Everyday Life School Experiences; Otherness

RESUMO

Inserido no âmbito de discussões das práticas de orientação de estágio curricular nas licenciaturas, este estudo busca interpretar a construção discursiva de registros escritos de estudantes de Pedagogia sobre suas experiências nas escolas de educação básica, com ênfase no uso de citações e referências. Inicialmente, o texto apresenta bases e princípios que justificam o uso de narrativas do cotidiano escolar como dispositivo formativo e descreve o trabalho desenvolvido com turmas do componente Estágio Supervisionado nos Anos Iniciais do Ensino Fundamental de uma universidade pública paulista. Em seguida, sob uma perspectiva dialógica da linguagem, analisa as produções enunciativas de duas estudantes que cursaram o estágio durante o contexto da pandemia de Covid-19. O estudo destaca o papel alteritário de referências e citações no texto das professoras em formação, realçando como esses recursos favorecem uma inserção mais profunda em reflexões articuladas a suas vivências nas escolas. Conclui-se destacando a importância de espaços de interlocução e produções de sentidos que ampliem o olhar para a complexidade do ensino.

Palavras-chave:
Formação de Professores; Estágio Curricular; Narrativas Pedagógicas; Cotidiano Escolar; Alteridade

Introduction

In this text, we present discussions on the practice in groups of the Supervised Internship in the Early Years of Elementary Education curricular component of the Pedagogy Program at a public university in São Paulo. More specifically, we reflect on supervision work¹ focusing on the production of narrative records of everyday experiences in elementary schools. The study seeks to contribute to a deeper understanding of the ‘practical-theoretical-practical’² relations expressed in the discursive productions of students of the program, showing how these reflections can inform the intentions of the training work conducted in these spaces.

A mandatory component in teacher education and pedagogy programs in Brazil, the teaching practicum has historically adopted different approaches in teacher education. Pimenta and Lima (2017) note some of these models, ranging from uncritical approaches - for considering the teaching practice and the school as immutable realities and/or focusing almost exclusively on the knowledge of technical intervention routines, without the need to master scientific knowledge - to approaches that reduce practicum to a perspective of criticism - which, as a stance contrary to instrumental didactics, is restricted to capturing possible deviations and failures of the school.

However, the authors observe that, since the 1990s, there has been a strengthen of trends focused on the relations between internship practices and instrumentalizing theoretical activity and practicum research, or practicum as research. Accordingly, this curricular component becomes characterized as a space for analysis, apprehension of reality and construction of knowledge about education, school and didactics. According to Pimenta and Lima (2017, p. 49, our translation), in conceiving that theory and practice are present in the university and in the field schools, the “[…] challenge is to proceed with the exchange, during the training process, between what is theorized and what is practiced in both [school and university].”

In this sense, during supervision, we propose reflections that expand the comprehensions of the contexts in which the internships occur via narrative records of experiences. We seek to create spaces in which Pedagogy students reflect both on the local context and on broader educational policies, recognizing the spaces of creation in the relations with the school community (other education professionals, students and families). These discussions are aimed at exploring the possibilities of acting in different realities and aligning them with a perspective of internship as a locus of socialization and professional development (Alarcão; Roldão, 2014), understanding it as part of a formative continuum, in the induction of and relation with continuing education (Nóvoa, 2017).

With an attentive consideration of the uniqueness of the events and the reflective movement undertaken by Pedagogy students, supervision spaces become singular and unique. This poses a challenge as to considering actions that enhance the training experience in the internship through discussions that may impact - even if in reflective terms - the interns’ activity in schools. Therefore, we consider the importance of approaching the ways in which teachers in training build their experiences in schools, mediated by the dialogues that they weave with educational knowledge and related knowledge, such as that of philosophy, sociology and linguistics.

In this study, we propose to interpret the discursive construction of written narratives by Pedagogy students in elementary education schools, with an emphasis on the use of citations and references. Such analysis can provide indications for working with teacher training internship classes, as to reflections on the school reality and teaching practice in articulation with academic knowledge. To this end, we initially present bases that support the use of narratives of educational experiences in internships as a formative device in the initial training of teachers. Next, we describe the supervision work in the Curricular Internship in the Early Years of Elementary Education in 2021, a period marked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, we analyze two narrative productions of students of the program in the period.

The students’ accounts are considered from a dialogic and enunciative-discursive approach to language (Bakhtin, 2016a; 2016b; Volóchinov, 2021), articulated to studies on academic argumentation (Compagnon, 1996; García Negroni, 2008), to interpret how they dialogue with academic-scientific knowledge in their narratives. From this perspective, we assume the text as a link in a chain of discursive communication, circumscribed in spheres of human action (Bakhtin, 2016a), a concept that, drawing attention to the diversity of cultural manifestations that “[...] acquire a relative value in the domain in which they are produced (literature, science, religion, media, education, etc.)” (Grillo, 2018, p. 156, our translation), is constituted as an index of refraction of the words. Thus, in coming into contact with other discourses in circulation in a given field, the accounts acquire a singular mode of interpreting the real.

The work with narrative records in internship

In recent decades, narrative and (auto)biographical approaches have been increasingly adopted in the educational field as devices both for teacher training (Prado; Soligo, 2005) and research (Motta; Bragança, 2019). This movement arose, in part, due to dissatisfaction with academic productions that talked about the school, but not with the school and from the school (Passeggi; Souza; Vicentini, 2011; Lima; Geraldi; Geraldi, 2015). Productions that often carry value judgments - both negative and romanticized - in relation to teaching work, distant from the complexity of the everyday school experience and of the teachers’ creation spaces, resulting in a caricature of teaching knowledge and practice.

We understand that, when teachers narrate their experiences with and in schools, we enter the field of recognition of an authorial teaching work (Lima; Geraldi; Geraldi, 2015). This process reveals knowledges, practices and enables shifts in the perception of the work of oneself and of one’s interlocutors. Cunha (1997) points out that the narrative does not present a literal truth of the facts, but rather forms of representation that the subject builds about them. According to the author:

Working with narratives in research and/or teaching is to undertake the deconstruction/construction of the personal experiences of both the teacher/researcher and the subjects of the research and/or teaching. It requires that the dialogical relationship be established, creating a complicity of double discovery. At the same time there is discovery in the other, the phenomena are revealed in us (Cunha, 1997, p. 187; our translation).

This construction and reconstruction process is continuous, forming images of oneself, of the other, and of reality. The subject is constituted in a tangle of social voices (Volóchinov, 2021), that is, in the relation with value systems and worldviews, which enables the continuous (re)construction of a singular position in relation to them. When reflecting on our own experiences, as occurs with the narratives in the practicum, the “I” is evoked and provoked to adopt other people’s views (Bakhtin, 2020), being placed in intersubjective relations with external/social value systems. This practice is inscribed in specific modes of participation in social practices (Smolka, 2000; Góes, 2000), which reflects an individual history inserted in a broader sociocultural context of values.

Prado and Soligo (2005) note that, when organizing the events of everyday school experience into narratives, pre-service teachers not only report, but also implicitly and explicitly value the events experienced. This allows these professionals to tell, explain and interpret their practices in schools. The narrative, thus, becomes a text with formative and transformative potential, especially by intertwining processes of authorship and identity construction (Passeggi, 2000).

Prado, Ferreira and Fernandes (2011) also argue that, in initial training, it is crucial to offer opportunities for teachers in training to reflect on their future activity. In addition to understanding the limits of teaching practice, these moments allow them to formulate questions for themselves and their colleagues, enriching the educational dialogue. For the authors, it is important for the student “[...] to start collecting elements that allow them to formulate questions for themselves, for their colleagues and for the various educators they will find in their professional practice” (Prado; Ferreira; Fernandes, 2011, p. 144). These opportunities are expanded when there are spaces for sharing and debating these narrative productions, strengthening the dialogue between the experiences and theoretical constructs worked on in the internship and in the program.

When addressing the autobiographical narrative (the writing of oneself), Santos and Torga (2020, p. 142; our translation) indicate that the narrated experience is not simply relived, but re-signified both by those who tell and by “[...] those who act in the active comprehension of a given account, co-creating and finishing the lights of their own interlocutor context for what the account contains.” This interlocutor, in addition to actively being constituted in the comprehension of the discourse of the other, in positioning themself on this text, as occurs when we provide spaces for reading and reflection on the experiences narrated, invites the author to expand their modes of understanding in relation to their narrative.

In the writing guidelines and in the moments of debate of narrative productions, we seek to build an investigative view that can coordinate school experiences and scientific-academic knowledge worked on in the internship and throughout the Pedagogy program. This view is directed to everyday school experience, in an attempt to understand macro-structural implications and think about the ethical postures that permeate the production of daily policies (Ferraço; Soares; Alves, 2017). Thus, we reflect on the creation spaces with the elementary education classes, considering the possibilities and limitations of the pedagogical work experienced in the classroom. This movement often occurs with the supervising teachers’ request for expansion of the reflections in the written records in order to relate them to the principles and productions under study. In this sense, the practicum can be seen as one of the advantageous spaces in the initial training for the emergence of a discursive construction that articulates theoretical-scientific knowledge with practical experiences in the daily routine of schools, materialized by the students’ voices in their written narratives.

The curricular internship and supervision meetings in remote teaching

This article uses narratives produced during a research work³ conducted with four internship classes throughout 2021. Forty-one informed consent forms were signed by the interns, agreeing with the use of narrative sources and teaching plans prepared in the period. In total, we had access to 131 productions (100 narratives and 31 plans). Considering the purpose of this article, we chose to focus on two specific narrative productions. The choice was strategic: in addition to representing a little of the diversity of experiences in the internship, these narratives stand out for the way in which the interns mobilized theories and concepts studied. Focusing on these productions, we were able to deepen the analysis of these articulations, ensuring a more detailed look at how the references were appropriated and reinterpreted in the dialogue with everyday practice. Thus, the selection allows exploring the ‘practical-theoretical-practical’ dialogue in the discursive construction of pre-service teachers.

The current curriculum of the Pedagogy program in question consists of a core articulated in five course sets: 1) theoretical-practical; 2) pedagogical research and practice; 3) curricular practices; 4) elective courses; and 5) program completion paper. To enroll in the internships, which are part of the theoretical-practical set, students must complete 30% of the program courses, being held from the 5th academic semester. The mandatory curricular internship is organized in seven courses, which, together, total 630 hours and are subdivided into three vectors: theoretical activities, practical activities and supervised activities⁴.

There are two internship courses oriented toward work in the early years of elementary education. Each of them consists of a total of 90 hours, distributed as follows: EP376 - Teaching Practices and Supervised Internship in the Early Years of Elementary Education has 60 hours for the practical axis and 30 hours for the theoretical axis; and EP911 - Supervised Internship II - Early Years of Elementary Education⁵, with 60 hours of practical activities and 30 hours of supervised activities. This small difference is due to the greater emphasis on the development of a plan of activity in the internship field in the second course. Both internships provide for supervised sessions with teachers and students of elementary education and spaces for study and dialogue in classes at the university, understood as supervision sessions. As a practical vector, it is understood the pedagogical work carried out in the teacher, student and knowledge triad, in class.

Returning to the specific context of this study, in 2021, due to the persistence of high rates of contamination and deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which directly affected the work carried out with schools in the field of curricular internship, there was an internal institutional movement of discussion, between coordination, administrative technicians, teachers and students, to think about the possibilities of maintaining internships in a remote model. Based on that, emergency plans were prepared for these courses (UNICAMP, 2021a; 2021b), assuming principles such as the defense of life and the holding of remote internships preferably in public schools. There was also a proposal for leveraging the workload of non-compulsory internships and engaging with the school community through interviews and participation in pedagogical meetings.

The group of professors⁶ responsible for the internships in the Early Years of Elementary Education sought to validate participation in synchronous activities with students and supervising teachers of elementary education, pedagogical meetings and/or preparation of asynchronous activities and teaching materials for the classes that the interns followed. Given the difficulties of several interns in finding schools to fulfill the practical vector in that context, some partner institutions of the Campinas Municipal Education Network received several Pedagogy students. This allowed everyone to participate in class sessions, even if remotely, in the face of the pandemic reality.

Within the scope of the supervision, at the time carried out through weekly collective sessions in the Google Meet® digital environment, the teaching plans of the courses provided for: discussions based on previously suggested readings; sharing of experiences in schools and written narrative records (narratives); debates on transversal themes mediated by invited graduate students and elementary education teachers; supervision and sharing of activity plans; meetings between internship classes and supervising teachers (called “Coffee with teachers”); and evaluation of the internship course.

The debates based on the suggested references encompassed issues ranging from the notion of practicum as a space for research and training and the role of experience records in this process to dimensions of teaching work and teaching practice in schools, in articulation with transversal themes (special education from an inclusive perspective, environmental education and ethnic-racial relations) and the impacts of the pandemic on schools. Among the texts worked on, we note those of Terezinha Rios (2008) and Paulo Freire (1997), which will appear in the discussions based on the records, in the next sub-item. There were also times when the students themselves presented references related to their trajectory in the program, or linked to the theme of the activity plan.

Regarding the narrative productions that we considered as the focus of this study, in the period, they were submitted by the students via a virtual Google Classroom® environment. These productions were read and commented on in supervision sessions and, later, in the online environment by the teacher responsible for the classes and by the graduate student associated with the Teaching Internship Program⁷. The comments generally dialogued with the reflections based on the situations narrated and suggested possible deepening considerations, especially in dialogue with the references studied in the internship, and even in the program. This deepening sought to provide a broader consideration of some phenomena, understanding their social, economic and political implications, in addition to the ways in which the interns mobilized their learnings to deal with the contradictions, possibilities and limitations inherent in teaching practice.

Views shifted in the relation with references and citations in the texts

In observing the interns’ records, we identified different marks that articulate them to their sphere of production: the academic-scientific field. They range from the thematic content, composition and style of these narratives (Bakhtin, 2016a) to the reflections of other voices, constitutive and marked or not, on the discursive surface (Authier-Revuz, 1990), through direct and/or indirect citations or insertion of references consulted. Voices that, orchestrated by the author-creator as the bearer of the representative principle of the utterance (Faraco, 2009), are actively appropriated in the unique and singular event of the text (Bakhtin, 2016a; 2016b).

Also in Bakhtin (2016a), recognizing the utterance as a unit of discursive communication implies understanding it as a totality of meanings, which is realized in a dialogical relationship between the voices that compose the text: those that surround and precede it, as well as the interlocutors that are projected. This dialogical relationship permeates the constitution of the utterance, being inseparable from the conditions in which it is inserted, one of the elements that gives it individuality and singularity.

The use of reference and the practice of citation integrate university life and illustrate this dialogicity. Undergraduate and graduate students, in their academic training, are encouraged to dialogue with texts and cite sources, in order to give legitimacy to their discursive productions in this field. In addition, this movement reflects the author’s ability to situate their ideas in broader debates, ensuring that their discourse is founded on established and relevant discussions. Thus, the appropriation of voices and the interlocution with other people’s discourses, while responding to an academic imperative, reveal the dialogical character of these discourses, since the uttering subject is never isolated from their conditions of production.

In this sense, far beyond a technical obligation, the act of referencing and citing is understood as a creative work. Antoine Compagnon, in his essay, The Work of Citation (1996), explores the creative dimension of the use of citations in the academic and literary context. According to him (Compagnon, 1996), citation is not only an instrument of validation or demonstration of erudition, but a means of building new significations through the rereading and recontextualization of texts. The author suggests that, in citing, the subject acts with the other’s words, reinterpreting and re-signifying them in a new context.

To think about this mode of acting with academic-scientific productions, we are also based on the contributions of García Negroni (2008), who addresses the position of externality assumed in relation to references and citations. The author (García Negroni, 2008) notes the ways in which the speaker (author) builds representations of what is said through the use of quotation marks, direct quotations, italics and enunciative glosses (comments). That is, attention is drawn to how the subject who utters marks stances toward the “already said”: adherence, disagreement, or opposition, for example.

In order to understand how these stance marks are expressed in the records of the students of the course and the other-oriented role of references and citations, we present below the first narrative:

The present narrative is divided into two parts, first a short account of three similar and interconnected events that I experienced in the internship field; and then a reflection on the internship in general. This reflection that composes the second part began briefly in the writing of my first narrative for this course and, at the request (encouragement/nudge) of Prof. Adriana, I will deepen it.

(...)

Reflections on my last account

For being in a private school, I have contact with other resources, ways of working and even educational interests. Since before the pandemic, I saw in this space a strong effort by teachers to follow the planned schedule (especially with the precious course booklet). This was always done within a time limit, filling in the last necessary page on the last day of class. With the pandemic and the impossibility of face-to-face classes, the pace was slower than usual, but at no time was it allowed to stop.

We have reached the 1-year anniversary of the school’s first closure, and it seems that (in this private context) the only thing that has changed is the distance between the desks and people’s faces, which are now partially covered by a protective mask. For the rest, apparently everything continues the same: we have textbooks full of pages that must be filled by a certain deadline, we have evaluations and we have demands. However, what almost no one talks about is what we have inside us, the pain of losses, the longing for the “normal,” the immense fear of the irreparable, the genocidal person that guides actions. And there is a reason this is not talked about. A more than ever political reason. And this should not be talked about at school, because each family has its own position... and this can cause conflicts.

I thought exactly about Terezinha Rios’ text when she talks about ethics in teaching work and the politics that it involves: “Pedagogical work is conducted in a political space and time, in which power transits, agreements are set up, hierarchies are established, commitments are assumed” (Rios, 2008, p. 79, our translation). I also think about how political our silence is. Whether it is optional or imposed. And how much not talking also builds the students’ imagination.

The production corresponds to a narrative written in the first semester of 2021, within the scope of the EP376 course. The student fulfilled the practical workload in a private institution where she participated in a non-obligatory paid internship in classes of the early years of elementary education. Noting that, according to the emergency plans (UNICAMP, 2021a; 2021b), there was the possibility of using these hours to fulfill the practical vector.

At the beginning of the text, the intern explains her division into two parts: the report of specific events and the broader reflection on events in the internship. This division already indicates a movement of distancing between the lived experience and the reflective positioning of the intern, suggesting a discursive construction that alternates between the report and a theoretical interpretation. Still in the introductory paragraph, she explicitly recognizes the influence of the training teacher in this movement, assuming a position in which the other encourages the continuity and deepening of reflection. The supervising teacher, therefore, introduces the intern in a broader process of dialogue with multiple voices (Volóchinov, 2021) - both of lived experiences and theoretical references.

Thus, the intern enters into dialogue with the values, rules and silence imposed by the institution, responding critically to what she perceives as an educational discourse centered on meeting deadlines, evaluations and course booklets, insensitive to the realities of students and teachers. By mentioning the policy of silence in schools and the figure of the “genocidal person” that guides government actions, she dialogues with larger contexts, which transcend the school space, and enters a discursive arena in which power, fear and ethics are negotiated. The use of a direct quote from Terezinha Rios (2008), which introduces reflection on the ethical and political dimension of pedagogical work, not only supports her perceptions and opinions, but also marks a position of exteriority (García Negroni, 2008), in which she distances herself from the discourse of others to reinforce her own reflections. This discursive construction indicates another-oriented role: the citation is mobilized to strengthen the criticism of silence in schools, giving legitimacy to the intern’s discourse. The citation, therefore, acts as a foundation for critical analysis.

The silence imposed in the ethical context of action, a concrete space where interactions and discourses occur situated in social, cultural and historical relations (Bakhtin, 2017a), is a counterpoint to the diversity of voices that the intern proposes in raising these issues and allowing other perspectives - such as that of Terezinha Rios (2008) - to also participate in the construction of her critique. In noting the ethical dimension of silence, the intern dialogues not only with what is spoken, but also with the “unsaid,” which arises from the movement of interpretation of the lived experience, in the light of a new discursive context (Bakhtin, 2016b; 2017b) in which the narrative of events is inserted. That is how this silence is described as “political,” which refers to the idea that all discourse - or the absence thereof - has ethical and political implications. Her reflection becomes an opposition in questioning the stance of neutrality that, in fact, perpetuates a certain configuration of power.

The narrative also indicates the identity construction of the intern, who, throughout the internship, acquires awareness of the political dimension of her own role as a future teacher. Her decision to reflect on “silence” and its ethical implications is, in itself, assuming a stance, albeit in reflective terms (Varani; Campos, 2022). Thus, she shifts from observation of events to critique, and finally to self-reflection, in a process that illustrates the very dialogical movement between the self and others in discourse (Bakhtin, 2020).

We proceed to the second narrative, by another student in the program. The account corresponds to the final production of the EP911 course and refers to the development of the activity plan in an elementary education class, in the second semester of 2021. As will be observed reported in the text, one of the dynamics adopted in the internship is the collective construction of teaching plans by the students, considering common purposes and themes. This method is adopted so they can think together about references and class planning, respecting the particular conditions and context in which they conduct the internship.

To begin with, I bring an excerpt that was striking for myself, present in the ninth letter of the book “Professora sim, tia não - Cartas a quem ousa ensinar” by Paulo Freire, read in the course.

It is impossible to teach content without knowing how students think in their real context, in their daily lives. Without knowing what they know independently from the school so that we help them to know better what they already know, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, so, based on that, we teach them what they do not yet know ( Freire, 1997 , p. 70, our translation).

It was based on this perspective that my internship partner and I sought to build our activity plan. Even working in different schools, with the diversity and characteristics that we could find, we tried to develop a welcoming project that could interest students, through the inclusion of elements of the reality of these children.

Our choice was to work with the subject of mathematics, since we are taking a course this semester with references and contents that gave us support to understand that mathematics does not need to be that subject that students feel terrified of, that they just try to fit the elements into the formulas, something mechanical and meaningless. On the contrary, we can present the subject in a pleasurable manner, helping students to attribute meanings to what they are learning, to weave correlations with everyday life.

In Graça Cebola’s text, there is a rich discussion about what elements are necessary for students to meaningfully understand the meanings of numbers, such as:

[...] what they are; how they are represented as objects, numerals or in numerical lines; how they relate to one another; how they are encompassed in structured systems with properties; and how they are used together with operations to solve problems ( Cebola, 2007 , p. 234, our translation).

To develop and provide a learning of mathematics, it is necessary that the classroom environment and the discussion around the subject is a continuous process, which values the strategies of each student to work on the problems. The activities can encourage students to create, invent, and discover other ways to reach the answers. Each way of working is valued by the teacher, so, even if the answer is not correct, the student’s reasoning is understood, so that they can understand where they made a mistake and how to solve it.

In the internship field, I was able to perceive the particularity of each student, during their learning of addition and subtraction operations. While some were already able to reach the result through mental calculation, others needed to learn (or didn’t even know) how and what to rely on to be able to solve the operation. Then I tried to assist through manipulable objects or facts, to assist them in thinking and understanding the process that was done. For the 1st grade, I realized that it was necessary to have elements in the places of the numbers, representing the quantity, so that after that they could do it in this way, learning to replace the drawings with the numbers. The feeling was very good when I drew on the blackboard a method with which they could solve the operations (drawing the elements and then counting the quantity). When I went there to see, there were already some doing the same on the sheet. In the learning process, it is challenging to recognize each student’s difficulty and try to find ways to help them.

Based on these experiences in the internship field and with the activity plan, I also make correlations with another excerpt from Freire’s text. The letter I read emphasizes the relation between what the author calls “concrete context” and “theoretical context,” which we are studying through the internship. Our activities in school enable us to learn about different realities, to relate events with texts and theories read in higher education, in addition to recognizing ourselves and constituting ourselves in a process in which, at the same time, we are apprentices and teachers. I realize that my experience with the internship, to consolidate myself as a future teacher, provides this need to keep practice and theory going together. I often find myself thinking about what my reality was as a student and how I should conduct my work, with the knowledge I have been acquiring as an undergraduate. We cannot act out of mere habit or routine, or tell children that something is so just because, or accept certain situations. The doubts in this path are necessary, because they lead to all the movement, the process of creation, discoveries and inventions, in search of answers. Therefore, “The ideal in our permanent education is that we are convinced of, and prepare for, the more systematic use of our epistemological curiosity” (Freire, 1997, p. 70, our translation).

In a moment of sharing experiences in the internship, I remember commenting on the distress in meeting the demands and allowing freedom in teaching and learning simultaneously. Then I heard from a colleague the need for a real connection with the children and with ourselves. Through this feeling, I have been striving to help my students and build a relationship that allows them to discover, learn and, of course, teach me a lot.

This second narrative reflects on the teaching-learning processes in elementary education, especially in the field of mathematics, and the learning of teaching. The construction of the narrative, which makes direct references to the thought of Paulo Freire (1997) and Graça Cebola (2007), seeks to correlate them with the experiences in the classroom, as well as marks the pre-service teacher’s stance in relation to the “already said,” which comes to be re-signified (Compagnon, 1996) by the reading she makes of it in the relation with the experience she lived in the internship field.

The initial citation of Freire (1997), which shows the importance of knowing the students’ reality, sets the tone (Volóchinov, 2021) for the reflection and is the foundation for the activity plan of the pre-service teacher, who seeks to include elements of the students’ daily lives in her teaching plan. By adopting that approach, in relation to the others to whom her narrative is intended (academic field, teacher, teaching intern and classmates), she validates her practice. But not only that, since she also enriches her discourse in bringing the discussion into a concrete context. This citation already establishes a relationship with Freire’s thought, which serves as an organizing axis for the school activity plan.

Throughout the text, in coordination with the citations and concepts provided, through her practical experience, she adds a new point of view, which is the construction of perceptions as an apprentice and pre-service teacher. This gives her discourse a singularity and a particularity that Bakhtin (2016a) values in discussing the unique nature of each utterance. The intern not only repeats or reproduces theories, but assumes a stance in relation to them, creating her own discourse that reflects her education as a teacher.

The text expresses a set of voices in dialogue: Freire, Cebola, those of the students with their different ways of learning, those of university colleagues who comment on the distresses and challenges of the practice, and the intern’s own voice. This coexistence of several voices and perspectives, which provide an interaction between academic discourse and practical experience, illustrates their pursuit of building an informed and conscious pedagogical practice, in which theory and practice go together, and where the voices of the others are creatively integrated into their training.

Final considerations

In considering the narrative record of the students’ experiences, we seek, especially from the Bakhtinian dialogical perspective, to highlight the other-oriented character of references and citations. We believe that this consideration constitutes us as training teachers in the internship in the sense of (re)thinking some practices in the training of new teachers. The dialogue with academic and practical knowledge enables an internship supervision that values both the students’ concrete experience and critical reflection on their experiences. Thus, the training process goes beyond a technical and instrumental character, coming to constitute a space for dialogue and construction of meanings for professional practice, in which theory and practice are mutually enriching.

In the analyzed narrative records, in reflecting on their experiences in the internship, the students indicate the active incorporation of references, re-signifying them based on their lived experiences. This movement, which occurs in the light of real practices lived in the everyday school experience, can contribute to the creation of new meanings and enhanced critical autonomy of pre-service teachers in teacher education programs.

In the internship, in promoting a reflection that integrates the voices of other authors and theories with the experiences of the field, we can encourage future teachers to conduct a more conscious pedagogical practice, recognizing the complexity of teaching, which, beyond methodological dimensions, encompasses socio-cultural, ethical and political aspects. Thus, it is important that university education - especially in internship supervision - considers the role of otherness of these multiple voices, in order to ensure that the training process results in more reflective, dialogical and potent teaching practices.

References

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• Support or funding:
  This work was carried out with the support of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) - Funding Code 001. Process number 140879/2022-6.
• Availability of research data:
  The entire set of data supporting the results of this study is not available, as it derives from a doctoral thesis in the final stages. The organized set (table with general data) will be made available in the Unicamp Research Data Repository after the defense, in accordance with the institution’s regulations. Until then, the data may be shared upon request to the authors.
• How to cite this article:
  AMARAL, Mateus Henrique do; VARANI, Adriana. Narrative records in the teaching practicum: the other-oriented role of references and citations’. Educar em Revista, Curitiba, v. 41, e97116, 2025. https://doi.org./10.1590/1984-0411.97116

• 1
  In the context of this study, supervision corresponds to meetings, in class at the university, between students of teacher education programs, professor responsible for the course, and undergraduate or graduate students in a support program or teaching internship in higher education.
• 2
  We chose to join the terms, since we consider that they are conceptually inseparable. Inspired by works in/of/with everyday school experience, this position seeks to break the dichotomization inherited from modern science and emphasize the diversity and complexity of the everyday experiences in which we live and research (Alves, 2003). When addressing internships, we prioritize the practical component, which corresponds to immersion in the field of work in elementary education to promote expanded dialogues with other systematizations, which enables the constitution of other considerations of the practices in which students are involved.
• 3
  The project was submitted to the Research Ethics Committee and approved through Opinion No. 4,491,273, of January 7, 2021 - CAEE: 40677820.0.0000.8142.
• 4
  The General Regulation for Undergraduate Programs, in Art. 27, in specifying the types of activity provided for in the course schedule, understands the theoretical, practical and supervised activities as follows: “I - Theoretical Activity (code T) - is the field that expresses the equivalent in weekly hours in person defined by the relationship, full-time, between teachers and students, with exposition and discussion of systematically organized content; (...) III - Practical Activity (code P) - is the field that expresses the equivalent in weekly hours that effectively involve students and teachers, full-time, in the practical work on the contents. (...) V - Supervised Activity (code O) - is the field that expresses the equivalent in weekly hours in which students conduct activities with autonomy, without the presence of the teacher.” (UNICAMP, 1998).
• 5
  In order to avoid repeating course names, they will henceforth be referred to in the text by using codes EP376 and EP911.
• 6
  A group of university professors is responsible for supervising the Internship in the Early Years of Elementary Education courses, assuming responsibility for different classes. In 2021, six EP376 classes and six EP911 classes were formed. All the classes considered in this study were supervised by the same professor, who was responsible for two EP376 classes and two EP911 classes during that year.
• 7
  The Teaching Internship Program is described by the Dean of Graduate Studies of the State University of Campinas as an institutional program that enables the improvement of the graduate student’s education for the internship in teaching experience or support for teaching activities in undergraduate programs.

• Responsible editors
  Associate Editors: Márcia de Souza Hobold and Isabel Maria Sabino de Farias; Editor-in-Chief: Angela Scalabrin Coutinho.

Data availability

The entire set of data supporting the results of this study is not available, as it derives from a doctoral thesis in the final stages. The organized set (table with general data) will be made available in the Unicamp Research Data Repository after the defense, in accordance with the institution’s regulations. Until then, the data may be shared upon request to the authors.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  03 Oct 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  30 Sept 2024
• Accepted
  26 May 2025