Teaching activity of a physics team: contradictions when developing school evaluation

Abstract

In the literature on teaching work, contradictions have usually been understood as fundamental to understanding the possibilities of changes in teaching. Thus, we present an excerpt of a research carried out with a physics team from a public school in the first months that followed a norm of higher instances made laboratory classes mandatory for high school. The reference is the socio-historical-cultural theory of the activity, we focus on the evaluation and the objectives are to understand the senses that the team attributes to the evaluation and to understand one of the contradictions of its activity system. The methodology is guided by González Rey and the records were notes in field notebooks, answers to the questionnaire and audio transcripts of weekly team meetings. The results indicated meanings attributed to evaluation that are close to the tradition of teaching and science, and that the team's reasons due to divergences of senses attributed to the theoretical and practical dimensions of learning print contradictions in the teaching activity system. We defend that the awareness of such contradictions in training work could contribute to enhance changes in teaching methods.