4. The research activity and the teacher’s role in the voice of a researcher

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to interpret, starting from a critical discourse analysis, the vision about the research activity and the teacher’s role as expressed by a research expert from the UPEL-IPB. The in-depth interview performed in the context of the research Project entitled: the teacher formation: implications in the pedagogical practice. To achieve the present hermeneutic-critical study, the researchers used as methodological tool the  semantic-pragmatic rhetorical model, starting mainly from the contributions by Van Dijk (1996, 2000), Bolívar (2007) and Berstein,(2000) in order to identify in the discourse the topic centers, the speech acts, the textual configurations and the rhetorical figures of discourse. The critical analysis of discourse made possible to identify two main topic cores: research activity and the teacher’s figure; around those topics were gathered a variety of sub-topics. The discourse develops a vision where the knowledge, the performance and the teacher’s speech are implicit in the research performance as social practice. It is concluded that the pragmatic interactions of discourse reveal how the researcher besides reflecting also projects a critical attitude towards the research situation stated, which is analyzed as an endogenous deficiency attributed to the guidelines assumed by the university management board  that have  produced a gap in the pedagogical practice of teachers from the UPEL- IPB.