Planning in the initial formation of teachers: a portrayal through the contributions of history education

Abstract

As Rosales López (2012) explains, the act of planning is a specific practice of the teachers’ action and, as such, it is essential that teachers in formation develop skills in the scope of that thematic. In the same line of thought, Roldão (2017) advocates the necessity of investigating the processes through which the curriculum, in its prescribed dynamics, is effectively materialized in educational contexts.

Starting from these assumptions, the goal of this article is to analyze the characteristics of future teachers’ planning, when undergoing supervisioned educational practice, namely the contributions of the curricular studies, as well as those more specific of history education (Barca, 2009). For such, we opted for a documental analysis of nine lesson plans from three different Portuguese universities. Also, in an approach to the Grounded Theory, we developed an example of a lesson plan as a portrait of the main noted tendencies.

In the end, we found out that the direction taken by the future teachers can be read through two different axes: i) a line of curricular thought influenced by the more traditional and bureaucratic theories, emphasizing, almost inherently, pedagogical strategies based on the prime action of the teacher and fundamentally expository; ii) the absence of the integration of some of the most relevant principles of history education – namely, the prevalence of historical thinking skills, the diversity of sources actually explored, and a recurring intertemporal relationship – , evincing that, still during the initial formation, the substantive knowledge is valued more, to the detriment of the history knowledge (Seixas, 2017).