The university as a locus for the construction of the professional practice of the beginning teacher educator

ABSTRACT This article addresses the professional practice of beginning teacher educators and is guided by the following question: How do beginning teacher educators build up their professional practice in teaching courses? The study aims to analyze the constitution of the professional practice of beginning teacher educators in the education process of teaching undergraduate courses. The concept of “beginning teacher” is supported by Marcelo Garcia (1999). This is qualitative, exploratory research and the data was collected using questionnaires, education memory reports, and narrative interviews with 23 beginning teacher educators working in the education and language teaching undergraduate courses in two public universities in the state of Paraná. Discursive Text Analysis (Moraes; Galiazzi, 2007) was used to treat the data. The research findings revealed common elements identified in the construction of the teaching professional practice such as the responsibility related to being a teacher educator, teaching as a complex activity, and the influence of more experienced teacher educators and students in the development of pedagogical practices.