E-ducate the eye and the gaze: audiovisual narratives, school context and supervised curricular internships¹

Abstract

This text is part of an investigative project in the field of teacher professional cultures. It aims at thinking about the processes of (re)construction of teacher identities that take place during the initial teacher training courses, especially among the teachers-to-be who are undergoing training in the Teacher’s Training Degree in Nature Sciences at the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of University of São Paulo (EACH-USP). During this period, the students carry out compulsory internship activities in schools. We asked the intern/students to elaborate audiovisual narratives that would unveil aspects of the interactions observed in classroom situations. The theoretical stake opened up two fronts: the education of the eye and the education of the gaze, aiming at the denaturalisation and deconstruction of contemporary gazes by encouraging different discursive orders about the schools. As a research hypothesis, we suppose that, as the type of language employed in the discursive production is changed, also changed is the education of the gaze via the education of the eye, allowing for invisible topographies, such as the processes of teaching and learning, to gain visibility by means of audiovisual language. The short films were analysed in the multiple languages employed: body, verbal, visual and sound, mobilising, in the students/interns, different ways of presenting how they lived the moment of their training. The conclusion is that the immersion of the interns/students in a single school, during one semester and a half, up until the production moment of the audiovisual piece, allowed them to experience the denaturalisation of concepts about what a state public school might be, grounded on their experiences with the production of short films.

Teacher identities; Professional cultures; Audiovisuals; Cinema; Supervised internship