Identidade profissional docente no contexto da docência universitária: os sentidos de ser professor

Abstract

The aim of the text is to analyze the meanings that teachers who work at university attribute to the category “being a university teacher”. The starting point was to understand that the analysis of these meanings enables characteristics that configure the professional teaching identity of university teachers to be known. For this purpose, a questionnaire with 84 teachers of different fields of knowledge from a university from Brazil’s Northeast was applied, in which it was asked “For you, what does being a university teacher mean?”. The organization and the data analysis happened according to the content analysis and IRAMUTEQ similitude software analysis. The findings show that the teachers inserted in the context of university teaching organize the professional teaching identity from three main meanings: teacher as a knowledge holder, teacher as researcher and teacher as a trainer. These meanings indicate that teaching is a secondary activity if compared to research and knowledge is something transmitted by the teacher to the student.