Teacher, Professional or Educator: the Conception of Special Education Teacher in the Academic Productions of the Specific Field of Special Education (2000-2016)

ABSTRACT:

In this paper we intend to present a study on the production of knowledge regarding Special Education teachers in Brazil from 2000 to 2016. Our objective is to analyze how the conception about this particular kind of teacher is being disseminated through academic research. It is a bibliographic and qualitative research, theoretically and methodologically based on historical-dialectical materialism. We used a review of academic research as a methodological procedure for the collection and analysis of data, which contributed to the selection of academic papers and initial analysis of the concentration of these works by year, location, faculty and research groups. Within the 16 years covered by this research, we selected 24 works including theses, dissertations, scientific papers and papers published in event proceedings, which focused their analyses mainly on Special Education teachers. These works allowed us to highlight the imprecision of how this particular kind of teacher is named, which, to a large extent, indicates the conception of teacher hegemonically disseminated at the beginning of the 21st century. In the analysis of the selected papers, we highlighted three ways of naming the Special Education teacher: the teacher, the professional and the educator, which, in short, demonstrate an extended conception of teaching and the correlation of academic research with the proposal of the educational policy in force.

KEYWORDS:
Special Education Teacher; Conception of Special Education Teacher; Production of Knowledge in Special Education

RESUMO:

Com este artigo temos a intenção de expor o estudo acerca da produção do conhecimento sobre o professor de Educação Especial (EE) no Brasil durante os anos de 2000 a 2016. O objetivo é analisar como está sendo disseminada a concepção sobre esse professor específico pelas pesquisas acadêmicas. Trata-se de uma pesquisa bibliográfica e qualitativa, cuja base teórico-metodológica é o materialismo histórico-dialético. Utilizamos o balanço de produções acadêmicas como procedimento metodológico para a coleta e análise de dados, o qual contribui para a seleção dos trabalhos acadêmicos e a análise inicial sobre a concentração desses trabalhos em ano, local, professores e grupos de pesquisa. Nos 16 anos que abarcamos nesta pesquisa, foram selecionados 24 trabalhos entre teses, dissertações, artigos científicos e trabalhos publicados em anais de eventos, os quais tinham como foco de análise o professor de EE. Tais trabalhos nos permitiram destacar a imprecisão sobre a forma de denominar esse professor específico, o que, em grande medida, indica a concepção de professor disseminada hegemonicamente no início do século XXI. Na análise dos trabalhos selecionados, destacamos três formas de denominar o professor de EE: o professor, o profissional e o educador, os quais, em suma, demonstram uma concepção alargada de docência e a correlação das pesquisas acadêmicas com a proposta da política educacional em vigor.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:
Professor de Educação Especial; Concepção de professor de Educação Especial; Produção do conhecimento na Educação Especial

1 Introduction

In this paper, we³ present the analyzes about the conception of Special Education teacher expressed in the academic productions of the specific field in the period from 2000 to 2016 in Brazil. Our intention of building a review of academic productions about the Special Education teacher⁴ is based on the need to understand what and how the authors of the field of Special Education (SE) have been researching about this teacher and to what extent they help us think about the constitution of Special Education in the 21st century in Brazil. It is a qualitative research of bibliographical character and with theoretical-methodological reference based on the historical-dialectical materialism. As Ferreira (2002) states, researches based on the “state of the art” or “state of knowledge” are defined

as of bibliographic character, they seem to bring together the challenge of mapping and discussing a certain academic production in different fields of knowledge, trying to answer which aspects and dimensions have been highlighted and privileged in different times and places, in which forms and in which conditions certain master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, publications in periodicals and communications in annals of congresses and seminars have been produced (Ferreira, 2002, p. 258).

The choice to develop this research based on the scientific works selected by the methodological procedure - review of academic productions - allows us to draw a panorama about the studies on the SE teacher and to develop analyzes regarding the teacher conceptions that are being disseminated in the academic environment. We assume that, in order to analyze Special Education, it is essential to understand it in the scope of the analyzes on the Brazilian public school, in view of the referral of this modality as a proposal for Specialized Educational Service in regular schools with policies of inclusive education, which have gained more expression from the document Política Nacional de Educação Especial na Perspectiva da Educação Inclusiva (2008) - National Policy on Special Education in the Perspective of Inclusive Education. The investigation on the conception of SE teacher is one of the elements that we consider important for the analysis of Special Education and public school, which we propose for this study under the aegis of academic productions. Thus, we ask: What conception of SE teacher is being disseminated by the academic productions of the specific field and to what extent do they contribute to the analysis and formulation of the Special Education proposal in the current conjuncture?

Our hypothesis is that the academic productions about the SE teacher meet the political propositions about this specific teacher and that their dissemination helps in the very conduction and production of education policy. In the analysis of the selected papers, we investigated, vertically, the conception of SE teacher present in the researches and to what extent there is a discursive hegemony around this specific teacher.

The proposal of this work is justified by the systematization of the researches around the SE teacher, which help in the production of scientific knowledge about this specific teacher, and by the dissemination of the conceptions about this teacher that contribute in understanding the own proposal of Special Education in Brazil. In order to think about the specific case of Special Education, we count on the approaches of Saviani (2013) and Jannuzzi (2012) on the teacher as mediator among the students and the scientific knowledge produced historically by humanity, with a view to the education of critical and conscious subjects in society. In this sense, the teacher is a fundamental part of the teaching-learning process and contributes to the conception and/or claim of the Brazilian public school.

Thinking about Special Education and how it is being articulated with the public school proposal makes us reflect on the teacher project within the scope of his/her educational and social relations. In this aspect, the methodological option of carrying out the academic production review on the SE teacher contributes to deepen the analyzes about this specific teacher and the proposal of Special Education for today⁵.

2 The review of academic productions on the teacher of special education: some elements of analysis

We chose to use the review of academic productions as a methodological procedure considering that, in addition to the search of published works, it allows us to understand: To what extent has this specific theme been researched? In what means of dissemination are they addressed? Is there any relationship with specific research groups? Is there concentration of research in certain regions of the country? How can these questions contribute to understand the scope of the topic? Can the SE teacher conception study contribute to understand the country’s current Special Education proposal?

In order to perform the analysis of the studies that approached the SE teacher as the focus of their research, we used as data source the search system for theses and dissertations in the portal of the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES); the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD) of the Brazilian Institute of Information in Science and Technology (IBICT); the portal of the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO); the Google Scholar search portal and the works gathered in the annals of the meetings of the National Association of Postgraduate Studies and Research in Education (ANPEd). We emphasize that the choice of these databases is based on the range of academic works available. However, this choice does not guarantee the totality of the research produced on the SE teacher. Nonetheless, it allows us a significant sample for the analysis of teacher conceptions which are being disseminated.

On these five fronts of search, except for ANPEd⁶, we used five descriptors: Special Education teacher, Specialized Educational Service teacher, specialized teacher, specialist teacher and resource room teacher, which were used in isolation.

At first, we did not delimit the search period, since we had the intention to select the largest number of possible works and to verify from which moment the SE teacher began to be object of researches. In Table 1, we have quantified the selected works by type of production.

Table 1
Number of works selected on the SE teacher by type of production, 2000-2016.

TYPE OF PRODUCTION	QUANTITY
Doctoral dissertations	4
Master's theses	12
Papers in journals	3
Works presented at events	5
Total	24

Source: Elaborated by the authors based on CAPES's Portal, BDTD, SciELO, Google Scholar and ANPED's portal of national meetings, 2016.

To select the studies that focused on the research of the Special Education teacher, we carried out four screenings. The textual elements used in this selection were: title, abstract, keywords and text in full. Thus, we selected 24 academic productions, which were published in the states presented in Graph 1.

Graph 1
Number of works selected on the SE teacher by state, 2000-2016.

Source: Elaborated by the authors based on CAPES’s Portal, BDTD, SciELO, Google Scholar and ANPED’s portal of national meetings, 2016.

Based on Graph 1, we can affirm the concentration of the works in the South, Southeast and Center-West regions, with a higher incidence in the state of São Paulo, being the highest number of productions disclosed at the Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCar) and the Universidade de São Paulo (USP). However, it is important to note that the concentration of scientific papers may not represent a correlation of groups of studies and/or research, since the authors are not necessarily bound to these institutions of the journals. Despite that, it is interesting to note that some of the universities with the highest incidence of production, such as UFSCar and UFSM, have a tradition of research in Special Education, and even undergraduate courses aimed at educating teachers to work in this field.

We consider it important to emphasize, from the perspective of the analysis of the contribution of the studies carried out in this field of specific knowledge, the most mentioned authors in the researches of the works selected for this survey of academic productions, considering that they demonstrate the theoretical and methodological options hegemonic about the productions about the SE teacher. The most cited three authors in the selected academic works were: Enicéia Gonçalves Mendes, referenced 52 times; Rosana Glat, referenced 27 times; and Marcos José da Silveira Mazzotta, referenced 25 times.

Enicéia Gonçalves Mendes is a professor at the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) and mentor of three works selected in this survey, which were defended in the Graduate Program in Special Education of that institution. Rosana Glat is a professor at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and has guided one of the master’s thesis selected for this work. The third most cited author was Marcos José da Silveira Mazzotta, a retired professor at the University of São Paulo (USP).

The three most cited authors are from the Southeast region, more precisely São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, which does not deviate from the selected works in this survey. This characteristic endorses the indication that the Southeastern region has a predominance in the productions on Special Education and, in this specific case, on the debates about the SE teacher.

The other authors⁷ also presented an expressive number of citations. The South region included nine authors⁸; the Central-West region, five⁹; and the Northeast region, one author¹⁰ among the most cited in the selected works. It is interesting to note that of these authors, eight are foreigners¹¹. Five of the most cited authors are used as a methodological reference, such as: Manzini (2008), Minayo (2001), Lüdke and André (1986), Gil (1994), Bardin (1994) – we point out that Manzini (2008) is the author of the field of Special Education.

In this analysis of the works, we focused our attention on the reading of the texts, on how and what they talked about the SE teacher with the intention of understanding the conception of teacher spread by the academic environment. Here we realized that many of the themes mentioned in the titles and abstracts did not match or lost strength during the course of the work, which made it possible to find a variety of nomenclatures directed to the SE teacher that were not immediately exposed. Here are some of them:

• specialized/specialist teacher (Lora, 2000; Lino, 2006; Regiani, 2009; Redig, 2010; Prieto, 2006; Tezzari, 2008; Petrechen, 2006);

• Special Education teacher (França, 2008; Padilha, 2011, 2012; Dorneles, 2013; Vilaronga, 2014; Zerbato, 2014; Camargo & Sarzi, 2012; Mercado, 2016);

• special teaching teachers (Dorziat, 2010);

• inclusive education teachers (Dias, Rosa, & Andrade, 2015);

• teacher of the Specialized Educational Service/Multifunctional Resource Room (Silva, 2008; Scherer & Dal’Igna, 2015; Rosa, 2015);

• Special Education professional (Siems, 2009; Freitas, 2013);

• Special Education educators (D’Agostini, 2011);

• specialized educator in Special Education (Baptista, 2011).

What we are interested to observe are, besides the imprecision about the denominations used in relation to this teacher, the definitions that each one carries. Does this finding make it possible to reflect on the difficulty of the specific field in assuming the work of Special Education as teaching work, thus using different terminologies? Do the different ways of naming the SE teacher represent different conceptions of teacher?

Kassar and Rebelo (2011) discuss the “special” of Special Education in education policies and point to the changes in the concept of Special Education throughout its history in Brazil, especially since the 1930s. The authors raise a discussion that we deem it pertinent to think about the different denominations used to express this particular teacher: the “special” of the Special Education is demarcated by the locus where it will be conducted (schools or special classes, home and hospital classes, regular schools)? Do the different nomenclatures for the SE teacher propose modifications to the context of Special Education or are we in the scope of disputes over terminology?

Many of the selected authors used different ways to name the SE teacher concomitantly. Thus, we have grouped these terminologies in what we understand to be the ones that carry the definition of each author, in order to comprehend the analyzes about him/her, in three axes: teachers, professionals and educators.

2.1 The teachers

When reading the selected works, we noticed that the teacher referred to can be grouped in the following denominations: SE teacher, specialized/specialist teacher, special education teacher, inclusive education teacher and teacher of Specialized Educational Service. Even though most of the authors did not present the definitions and the reason why they use these terminologies to refer to this specific teacher, we observed that there are similarities about the characteristics, but there are also divergences.

The SE teacher, to the authors selected in this survey of academic productions, is synonymous with the specialized/specialist teacher. The definition is anchored in the requirement of education to work with students of Special Education established by the National Education Guidelines and Framework Law (Lei de Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional - LDBEN) No. 9,394, of December 20, 1996 (Lei nº 9.394, 1996), which provides for education at the middle or higher level in Special Education or graduate studies.

It should be noted that many authors have highlighted the characteristics of the SE teachers based on their education; among them, the difference between general or specialized education. The general education would be that which contemplates the basic contents of teaching and those specific to Special Education; the specialized education that directs towards a certain type of disability based on the analyzes of Bueno (1999), França (2008) and Siems (2009). Regiani (2009) uses the term specialist teacher in Special Education from the generalist perspective, that is, teacher with specialization Latu Sensu in Special Education focusing on all the disabilities. There are two approaches to general education: the one that includes a teaching base and specific knowledge and one that provides knowledge about all the disabilities. However, Redig (2010) highlights the term generalist teacher¹² as regent of the regular classroom and specialist teacher as the one that works with the target public student of Special Education, respectively.

The study on education was one of the most recurrent methodologies of the work on the teacher of SE or specialized/specialist, the great majority in the perspective of the courses of initial/continuing education as conditioner for the effectiveness of the proposal of inclusion. Lino (2006, p. 36) emphasizes: “Well-educated and trained specialist teachers from the perspective of inclusion are key pieces in the inclusive school link”.

With the reading of the selected papers, it was possible to observe that some of them resorted to the analysis about the lack of education or this being insufficient and detached from the reality in the schools, formulated externally to the interests of the teachers. Or, to others, the teacher education to work with Special Education is seen as positive, since it empowers teachers for inclusive education, as is the case of Petrechen (2006), that, by focusing on the work of the “teacher of mentally handicapped” in the state of São Paulo, indicates his conception about the education when stating that he follows the assumptions of his research group Human Resources Education in Special Education (GP-FOREESP)¹³: “A policy of teacher education is one of the pillars for the construction of school inclusion” (Petrechen, 2006, p. 21).

Education as a condition for the success of Special Education in the inclusive perspective induces the inference that the education courses should be directed to the process of school inclusion. In this sense, the teacher with the focus on “inclusive education” (Dias et al., 2015) would be responsible for its implementation in regular schools. The teacher responsible for inclusion, for these authors, is not necessarily the SES teacher, but the one who has the education to work with Special Education students. Authors such as Prieto (2006) emphasize the education, but warn not to fall back on the responsibility of the Special Education students only to the specialized teachers.

Many authors mentioned the SES teacher as synonymous with SE teacher. Zerbato (2014), when listing the assignments of the SE teacher, cites the requirements concerning the SES teacher. To Silva (2008), the teacher of multifunctional resource rooms is called Specialized Support Teacher (SST).

Dorneles (2013) presents, in her research, how the discourses produced in the Special Education policy in the inclusive perspective induce the pedagogical practices of SE teachers for SES teachers. In the same perspective, Mercado (2016) points out that the process of reconversion of SE teacher to SES teacher, without proper conditions, such as, for example, an adequate education, reinforces its deprofessionalization.

D’Agostini (2011) differentiates herself when working with the teacher of the special teaching, the one that works in the schools or specialized institutions. It was not the case of Dorziat (2010) who presented this terminology as synonymous with SE teacher in regular schools. Another strong feature of the studies that addressed the SE teacher and/or specialized/specialist teacher were his/her attributions and his/her locus of action.

From the selected researches, Camargo and Sarzi (2012), Vilaronga (2014) and Zerbato (2014) indicated in their titles and abstracts that they were researching the SE teacher in duo teaching, teaching or collaborative teaching. The conceptualization of these three ways of naming the SE teacher’s work together with the regular classroom teacher are similar to the authors. To Zerbato (2014, p. 38): “Co-teaching is a service of support to school inclusion also known as collaborative teaching and involves a partnership between Special Education teachers and the common classroom (...)”.

Vilaronga (2014, p. 179) emphasizes that “collaborative teaching is one of the necessary supports to strengthen the proposal of school inclusion (...), and collaboration between the Special Education professional and the classroom essential for the construction of this inclusive space (…)”.

The previously mentioned citations demonstrate the conception around the teacher of SE that acts in the regular classrooms in the proposal of the collaborative teaching. Special Education is proposed as a service of school inclusion (Zerbato, 2014), in which the SE teacher will act in support with a view to the implementation of school inclusion (Vilaronga, 2014), being the school teaching not his/her responsibility¹⁴.

However, other authors have also addressed this theme, such as: Lino (2006), França (2008), Redig (2010) and Freitas (2013). Lino (2006), in the perspective of support and assistance, states that “specialist teachers serve as intermediaries between teachers and students with disabilities, enabling them to understand their needs and particularities” (Lino, 2006, p. 35). If the SE teacher serves as an intermediary, as a means to the regent teacher, can we infer that this idea reinforces the conception of SE teacher as a resource?

As we can see, the concepts of collaborative and cooperative teaching are used as synonyms, since, from the perspective of the authors, both express the work of the SE teacher as support or as the intermediary in the regular classroom. At the same time that they put themselves as an alternative to the policy model with the SES teacher, the essence of these teachers’ characteristics is similar. In this way, it is a pedagogical face of the political dispute around the conception of SE teacher.

The selected works that were articulated in this item also present other denominations for this specific teacher. In addition, they have brought important elements to think about the conception of hegemonic SE teacher in the field of knowledge. It is interesting to note that most of the works did not demonstrate the conception of teacher as one who teaches school knowledge; on the contrary, in the course of their research they reinforced the idea of a teacher who acts in support of inclusion or the teacher of the regular classroom, even those who thought this teacher inside the regular classrooms in a joint work. This was not characterized by the teaching of school content, but as a resource of inclusive perspective policy. Only the work of Padilha (2012) presents an analysis of these characteristics related to the conditions that are presented to these teachers, both with the objectives of a disqualified education and with conditions and precarious work contracts.

The teacher conception of this axis allows us to consider that the teacher terminology used by them is characterized essentially by the education they present and as one more teacher who joins a multiprofessional team for the supposed success of inclusion in school. The teacher referred to here does not assume the role that we understand to be the main characteristic - to teach school knowledge, and corroborates with the proposal of teacher expressed in the policies of Special Education in the inclusive perspective, which incorporates in this teacher elements of management and technical work to the detriment of school content teaching (Vaz, 2013).

2.2 The professionals

Many of the authors selected, when talking about the SE teacher, used the terminology “professional education”, as Freitas (2013) did. Other authors have also used this expression, but as a complement to the terms teacher or educator (Siems, 2009; Dorziat, 2010; Baptista, 2011; Padilha, 2012; Vilaronga, 2014). Although they do not specify the meaning of this terminology or present any difference in relation to the term teacher, we can indicate in their analyzes that there is a direction of meaning for the performance of these teachers.

To Freitas (2013), the “support teacher for inclusion” is another professional that aggregates the other school employees with the goal of contributing to the inclusive perspective. According to the author:

The work of education professionals has become a fundamental condition for education and inclusion of students with special educational needs. Support for these students has raised the discussion about the relationship between Regular Education and Special Education: it involves debate about the need to develop an articulated action between the different educational agents (Freitas, 2013, p. 22).

The “support teacher for inclusion”, cited by Freitas (2013), is much more focused on inclusion than on the regent teacher or the students. In this case, the SE teacher is also configured as a resource for inclusion in the regular school. The term “inclusive education” brings together a diversity of discourses, such as: recognition of rights, combating prejudice and discrimination, overcoming inequalities; however, these precepts are not exclusive to Special Education. The term “inclusive education” in this case obscures what is specific to Special Education and assists in imprecision about the SE teacher.

Dorziat (2010) addresses professionals for inclusion as SE teachers, those with “knowledge” needed to work with Special Education students. Siems (2009) analyzes the teacher as a professional category, in the sense of their professionalization, that is, the teacher is a professional. The author analyzes the identity constitution of the professional that works with students with disabilities.

In the sense of the practice of these teachers, Baptista (2011), when elaborating analyzes on the teacher that works beyond the classroom, whether in regular teaching or in multifunctional resource rooms, states that if there is no integrated work among professionals, the relationships that are established in the school will not have much effect in the work of this teacher, except to reproduce old segregating practices of the Special Education.

There is a certain consensus in the scholarly research selected around the speeches about the SE teacher in collaborative work, co-teaching, support, integrated work or as an intermediary between the regent teacher and the student with a disability. It should be noted that, in these studies, this specific teacher is seen as a support, most of the time, for the effectiveness of the proposal of school inclusion, not being evidenced his/her performance with the teaching of school contents. Two issues can be raised: 1) the proposal of the Special Education policy in the inclusive perspective exercises the hegemony over the conception of Special Education as a service and no more modality of teaching, in order to pass on the analyzes on the SE teacher of the selected works; 2) the emphasis on the work of this teacher within the regular classrooms, while representing an advance in the discussions about the SES teacher, is restricted to the way in which the proposal of his/her work will be conducted, or to the locus where it will be carried out, not the content of his/her performance; in this way, the objective of the teacher’s work in focus in the regular school does not change. The proposal of collaborative teaching is centered on the presence of the SE teacher in the regular classroom, but on the same criteria of work proposed by the policy in exalting the SES teacher.

In another aspect, Padilha (2012) analyzes the constitution of the teaching profession of the SE teacher of the state of São Paulo (SP) and, in this sense: “The education professional is the one who develops his/her work with criticality and autonomy, that is, conceives it, executes it, and evaluates it through his or her experience” (Padilha, 2012, p. 189). However, to the author, the relations imposed on the school prevent the effective work with the teaching-learning relationship of these teachers and students.

It can be said that the professional development of Special Education teachers with the history of philanthropy in the area, benevolent actions, donation, among other presuppositions, nowadays contrast with different conditions of the world of work in the twentieth century. These labor intensification constraints, value added at the cost of the workforce, are underpinning the work of these teachers in public schools in SP (Padilha, 2012, p. 184).

There is in the works the identification of the need of a team to work with the Special Education students, that is, professionals involved, of which the Special Education professional is a part. According to this analysis, the SE teacher is on the same level as other health professionals and assistance within the regular schools. Therefore, Special Education in the regular school does not necessarily gain the character of school education when entering this space, but it is added to the vision of Special Education as assistance, present throughout its history.

As we can see, the works that approached this axis were for reflections on the profession category teacher of the Special Education teacher and the construction of the identity of this professional as part of a team in favor of the school inclusion of the target public students of Special Education. We can hypothesize that the term “Special Education professionals”, in most cases, refers to the equation of school professionals, and can be attributed to an analysis of the emptying of the genesis of being a teacher to the SE teacher.

2.3 The educators

Although the minority of the selected works mentioned the teacher of SE as an educator (Baptista, 2011; D’Agostini, 2011), we verified the relevance of this axis to understand the differences that are established between the two. As we have seen, the nomenclatures used are mainly based on a type of education and, in this specific case, there is the discussion about the initial education to work with the students of the Special Education, in the courses of teaching degree in Special Education that graduate the special educator.

Baptista (2011) used more than one term to name the same teacher and presented the concept of “educator specializing in Special Education or special educator”. The author states:

I am considering specialized educator in special education or special educator those with specific education: degree course in the area; in pedagogy, with specific qualification; specialization course or complementary studies. This plurality of education dimensions is guaranteed by current legislation, which does not specifically define a trajectory (Baptista, 2011, p. 1).

To Baptista (2011), the Educator is clearly another type of professional that goes beyond the functions of teacher, must include attributions of management of the inclusion in the school and the joint work to the other teachers. The author affirms that we should think of the action of this teacher beyond the classroom, but as an articulator of the inclusion of the school, as: “The corrective and ‘reparative’ dimension can permeate the counseling, duo teaching, work with other interlocutors” (Baptista, 2011, p. 5). D’Agostini (2011) does not differentiate teacher and educator when elaborating her work on the conception of special school educators about inclusion.

In this sense, Special Education educators have the same characteristics of SE teachers and the professional that works with Special Education students. Although Baptista (2011) differentiates teacher from educator, when we verified the conception of SE teacher of the other authors of this survey, they resemble the educator’s conception cited by the author. The SE teacher, in this case, is responsible for inclusion in schools and for working together with other professionals. The conception of “Special Education educator” expands the duties of teacher and, at the same time, restricts the act of teaching school contents. According to D’Agostini (2011), “the educator is not a mere instructor”. We can conclude that the authors of this survey of academic productions claim the work of this specific teacher inside the regular schools, at the same time that they disfigure the very concept of being a teacher.

These indeterminations about the terminology used in reference to the SE teacher may point to a conception on the agenda. For what is indicated, although the authors name the teacher of SE in different ways, the conception of teacher seems to be based on the idea of an educator with an extension of his/her work in the school to the detriment of the act of teaching beyond the adapted resources, which brings us to the discussion of polyvalence and the multifunctional teacher (Vaz, 2013). In this way, we can show, with this survey of academic productions, that the terminologies about this teacher are anchored in the conception of a widespread teacher; thus, the different designations are related to disputes over the technical-pedagogical side of the educational project.

3 Final considerations

The three suggested axes of analysis complement each other because they are dealing with the same teacher with some differentiated characteristics, but we chose to separate them for a better understanding of the ideas mobilized by the authors and to assist in the studies on the conception of SE teacher.

In the analysis of the selected works for this survey, we observed that only the text of Dorziat (2010) represents the Northeast region, the others are concentrated in the Southeast, South and Center-West regions. The region with the highest number of selected works was the Southeast, especially the state of São Paulo, with emphasis on UFSCar and USP.

In relation to the year of publication, the largest concentration is in 2008 with research that is related to the new requirements, new demands, new contexts for the SE teacher, followed by the years 2006, 2011 and 2015. The works selected in 2014 (Vilaronga, 2014; Zerbato, 2014) drew attention because they dealt with the study of the teacher of SE in the co-teaching, researches linked to the GT-FOREESP, which is also the case of Petrechen (2006). However, we have also selected works on duo teaching (Camargo & Sarzi, 2012) and collaborative teaching (Freitas, 2013) which may indicate, through the research, that the SE teacher work is being required in the regular classroom as support or auxiliary and not only in multifunctional resource rooms. As we have observed, the dispute over the locus of action of these teachers is in the field of the way in which the policy should be implemented and not in its essence, that is, the selected research corroborates with the conception of Special Education and proposed SE teacher by the policy of inclusive perspective, since they do not claim the teacher as mediator, who works with the teaching about school knowledge in order to enable a critical understanding of social reality (Jannuzzi, 2012).

Much of the research referred to here does not indicate in their themes the study on the education of SE teachers, but they have dedicated themselves to analyzing it in chapters or topics of their works, which could indicate a link between knowing the education to understand the teacher of SE. However, the approaches were either by reporting the history of teacher education for Special Education, which is contained in educational policy documentation, or teacher education linked to their ability to work.

We can state, in this study, that teacher education is a topic usually addressed in the research on SE teacher, but it is not critically considered, in this specific field, as a conditioning of an instrumental work, quick and with lack of theoretical reflection, model which complies with the guidelines of the Multilateral Organizations for teacher education at all levels of education.

The terminologies adopted by the authors to designate the SE teacher are interconnected by the requirement of education for their performance. However, some points should be noted: 1) if the SE teacher is synonymous, according to his/her education, as a specialized or specialist teacher, then the equivalence between SE teacher and SES teacher is mistaken by some authors, but endorsed by the inclusive perspective policy itself; 2) the idea of a Special Education professional is different from the professionalism of the teacher, since the first one joins other professionals to form a support team for the school (social worker, psychologist, speech therapist, etc.), and the second is the intention to analyze this teacher as a professional category; 3) the term “Educator” ¹⁵ refers to the contraposition of the concept of teacher that we have approached, which has in his/her primary duty to work with the knowledge historically produced, since the educator must guide his/her work in all contexts of the school, such as management, teaching, resources adapted, work with parents, thus, the duties of the teacher are extended.

These different terminologies to name the SE teacher and their various definitions contribute to the assertion that the conception of this specific teacher reflects the difficulty of the field of assuming the SE teacher as a teacher (one who works with the scientific knowledge produced by humanity) but rather as the teacher of the means, of the adapted techniques; thus, they do not propose modifications in the understanding of Special Education, on the contrary, they are in line with what is proposed to the SES teacher in the education policies in force (Resolution no. 4, of October 2, 2009).

In this way, we consider that the conception of the hegemonic SE teacher, disseminated by the production of the knowledge chosen for this paper, is based on the understanding of the teacher as support, resource, means, interlocutor of the target public students of Special Education with the classroom teacher of regular classrooms, whether in multifunctional resource rooms, in the classroom itself or in the management of inclusive processes in school. This approach is in line with the political proposals for education in the country, especially regarding teacher education for the extension of the work as opposed to theoretical knowledge, as pointed out by Evangelista and Triches (2008). This finding endorses our initial assumption, in which we consider that Special Education cannot be understood as displaced from the analysis of Basic Education and its multiple determinations, such as: education, career, structure, financing, etc.

Through the analysis of the selected works, we could observe that academic productions, for the most part, disseminate and even contribute to the production of the policy around Special Education, in this case the SE teacher specifically. However, they do not present a discussion about the conception of this teacher as an articulator/mediator of the scientific knowledge to the target public students of Special Education. The SE teacher, in this case, has characteristics of resource for the effectiveness of the inclusion policy in regular schools.

• Financial support: CNPq
• 3
  The use of the first-person plural in this paper was with the intention of demarcating that this research is part of the others developed by the Research Group on Educational Policy and Work (called GEPETO) from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), which, as a whole, contribute to the understanding of education policies and their specificities.
• 4
  We decided to use the nomenclature Special Education (EE) teacher to facilitate the understanding about the teacher who acts or is being educated to work with the target public students of Special Education throughout history.
• 5
  It is worth mentioning that in April 2018, under the government of Michel Temer of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB) through the Secretariat for Continuing Education, Literacy, Diversity and Inclusion (SECADI), a new evaluation of the national policy of Special Education is proposed, which is still under discussion as published in the Ministry of Education’ site. Retrieved on October 16, 2018 from http://portal.mec.gov.br/ultimas-noticias/202-264937351/62961-politica-de-educacaoespecial- devera-passar-por-atualizacao.
• 6
  The search for works at the ANPEd portal was carried out by reading the titles and keywords of the academic works made available on the Internet in all editions of the event. We selected papers that addressed the five descriptors used in the other databases.
• 7
  We emphasize the authors, in order to organize the research, who had 5 or more quotations presented in the selected academic works.
• 8
  Rosalba Maria Cardoso Garcia (Santa Catarina), with 15 references; Maria Helena Michels (Santa Catarina), with 11; Acacia Zeneida Kuenzer (Paraná) with 9; Soraia Napoleão Freitas (Rio Grande do Sul), with 7; Rejane de Souza Fontes (Rio Grande do Sul), with 6; Antônio Carlos Gil (Rio Grande do Sul), with 6; Cláudio Roberto Baptista (Rio Grande do Sul), with 5; Ana Beatriz Cerisara (Santa Catarina), with 5; Eneida Oto Shiroma (Santa Catarina), with 5.
• 9
  Mônica de Carvalho Magalhães Kassar (Mato Grosso do Sul), with 10 references; Iria Brzezinski (Goiás), with 9; Dulce Barros Almeida (Goiás), with 6; Maria de Fátima Guerra de Sousa (Distrito Federal), with 6; Denise de Oliveira Alves (Distrito Federal), with 5.
• 10
  Lúcia de Araújo Ramos Martins (Rio Grande do Norte), with 8 references.
• 11
  António Nóvoa (Portugal), with 13 references; Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (United Kingdom), with 11; Suzan Stainback and William Stainback (USA), with 9; Maurice Tardif (Canada), with 8; Karl Marx (Germany), with 7; Carlos Bernardo Skliar (Argentina), with 6; Laurence Bardin (France), with 5; José Manuel Esteve (Spain), with 5.
• 12
  The author equates the generalist teacher with the qualified teacher specified by CNE/CEB Opinion No. 17 of June 3, 2001 (Parecer CNE/CEB no 17, 2001), who claims to be the regular classroom teacher who in his or her secondary or higher education had disciplines related to Special Education.
• 13
  The GP-FOREESP linked to the UFSCar originated in 1997 and is currently coordinated by PhD Professor Enicéia Gonçalves Mendes. The researchers Vilaronga (2014) and Zerbato (2014), mentioned in this paper, are also linked to this group.
• 14
  Both researchers were guided in their research by PhD Professor Enicéia Gonçalves Mendes, who has developed the extension project “SOS Inclusion” at UFSCar and guided master’s and doctoral research on Special Education collaborative teaching since the beginning of the 2000s.
• 15
  We reiterate that the term Educator, used here, does not refer to specific education in Special Education undergraduate courses

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  Jan-Mar 2019

History

• Received
  20 Mar 2018
• Reviewed
  29 Oct 2018
• Accepted
  30 Nov 2018