Curiosity as a category in teaching training: knowing things

Abstract

We propose dialogues on the category of curiosity based on Dewey and Paulo Freire who consider it as the germ of the act of reflective thinking, bringing into consideration, to develop such an argument, the formative experience of two educator-researchers. We do not intend to mention the differentiation of the political-pedagogical perspective between the two. We attempt, based on the confluence of the principles of this concept, as presented by the two authors, to propose reflections on the principles of the epistemology of the training practices of educator-researchers. The text is not just a literature review; its argumentative path is also composed of the observation, production and analysis of data that took place with the research participants: a pedagogical assistant and an educational services coordinator from a public education network in a city in the metropolitan region of São Paulo. We took as a field of observation to generate data the path developed by the participants in a professional master's program in education at a university in São Paulo and the action research in the training context in the school environment carried out by the participants. As a driver of the analysis, we used the concept of dispositions present in the methodology of Lahire's sociological portraits and which was used to identify the activation, in different contexts, of the disposition towards curiosity until its elevation to the intellectual field or epistemological curiosity.