Formação docente continuada e empreendedorismo na rede estadual de ensino da Paraíba: uma análise do Programa Gira Mundo 2015-2024

Abstract

This doctoral thesis investigates continuing teacher education and the hegemonic ideology that guides entrepreneurship in the public school system of Paraíba, focusing on the Gira Mundo Program (2015–2024). The general objective was to understand the pedagogical conception underpinning continuing teacher education in the program, based on the perspective of historical-dialectical materialism. The analytical categories defined were ideology, reproduction, and contradiction; and the empirical categories were continuing teacher education, entrepreneurship, teacher professionalization, and educational work. The methodological path followed a qualitative research design, with semi-structured interviews conducted with 12 state school teachers who participated in the program during the defined period, in exchanges in Finland and Mondragón (Basque Country). The analysis, grounded in dialectical materialism, showed that, although teachers recognize the training as a meaningful experience, there is an ongoing tension between pedagogical practices (active methodologies, cooperative education, and school-community integration) and the imposition of neoliberal logic (entrepreneurship aligned with market interests). The interviews revealed that, on the one hand, the program contributed to pedagogical practice through the use of diversified methodologies, greater awareness of cooperation and interculturality, and the partial socialization of projects in Paraíba schools. On the other hand, they highlighted the structural and political fragility of the program: limited replication of projects, insufficient institutional support, difficulties in adapting to the reality of public schools, and the ideological appropriation of entrepreneurship by business logic, which empties the critical nature of the training. The findings confirm that the continuing teacher education promoted by the Gira Mundo Program reproduces a neoliberal conception of education, centered on disseminating the discourse of entrepreneurship and adaptive “learning to learn” competencies. This orientation undermines the articulation between content, form, and recipient, displacing the social purpose of teacher education toward market-oriented objectives, out of step with the concrete needs of Paraíba’s public schools. Nevertheless, the interviews also highlighted contradictions: while ideological impositions are evident, experiences of resistance and the production of critical pedagogical alternatives also emerge. Teachers reinterpret concepts such as “social entrepreneurship” or develop active methodologies in favor of emancipatory educational practices, as resistance to this ideological imposition. Thus, the research demonstrates that the Gira Mundo Program constitutes a neoliberal educational trend, but one that, situated within a contradictory superstructure, may open fissures that reveal the ongoing dispute between competing projects in continuing teacher education within Paraíba’s state school network. The results point to the need to consolidate continuing teacher education linked to public universities, in organic articulation with state school systems, ensuring a training process grounded in scientific research, the historicity of knowledge, and human emancipation. In this sense, teacher education must overcome the immediacy of adaptive practices and assert itself as a critical mediation between historically systematized knowledge and educational work, guaranteeing the centrality of knowledge and the construction of teachers’ historical-critical consciousness.