Editorial

Abstract

EditorialThis issue of Education and Research inaugurates its publication online only and has been organized into three major themes: teacher education, early childhood education and special education. They bring to the fore questions that insist on challenging Brazilian educational policies because their results are still insufficient to produce the effects of improving the quality of education.The eight articles on teacher education reveal problems from the analysis of the implications of the reform in the education undergraduate degree, implemented in Brazil in the mid-2000s, including, as specificities of the subject, students' motivations to choose the teaching profession, the challenges to the beginning and permanence in that career, quality factors of the national educational policy, the exploration of the reflective approach, and finally a production that focuses on the relationship between education students' mastery of information technology and communication and their understanding of its use in educational practices.This theme opens with and article by Selma Garrido Pimenta, José Cerchi Fusari, Cristina Cinto Araujo Pedroso, and Umberto de Andrade Pinto, who lead us to think about teacher training in "Teacher education courses (Pedagogy)*: weaknesses in the basic training of a teacher". Discussing research conducted with the objective of debating the training of multipurpose teachers for early childhood education and the early years of primary education, in education courses, taking into account the implementation of their guidelines in 2006, the authors use the documentary analysis of curricula of "public and private institutions in the state of São Paulo". Results confirm problems already explored in the literature on the subject, namely: "the vagueness of the pedagogical field and the scattering of the scope of pedagogy and the teacher's professional practice". The authors conclude that the courses fail to fulfill all of their roles, because they "are not fully training neither the educator nor the multipurpose teacher," and also extract from their findings contributions to new investigations, which can be taken as references for overcoming the problems identified.