Developing Analytical Categories in Research on the Conceptual Profile of Continuing Teacher Education

Abstract

The growing interest in recent decades for Continuing Teacher Education (CTE) arises in academic productions a heterogeneity in the ways of thinking this concept and an emerging need for summarization. This paper aims to address and discuss part of the methodological process covered in the author’s dissertation (AUTHOR, 2019), focusing on the establishment of categories of analysis intended to understand these different ways of thinking about the CTE, thus modeling the polysemy of the concept. Since this process is grounded on the Conceptual Profile Theory (MORTIMER and EL-HANI, 2014), its specificities make the exposure and discussion a substantial step towards better identifying epistemological and ontological commitments that delineate the zones of the CTE concept, i.e., by taking a retrospective and analytical look at the research, a better understanding of how the model is constructed is created. In this work, the feasibility of the epistemological categories Training, Continuity, Change and Learning is verified, since they promote the dialogue of the genetic domains of investigation, identifying commitments for different compositions of these categories, yet their limitations points towards the need of reiteration for the model refinement.