Deaf teacher formation of Libras: the centrality of bilingual environments

The study object of this thesis intertwines the history of deaf education in the last 30 years in three schools for the deaf in the cities of Campina Grande, Gado Bravo and Aroeiras, Paraiba, the life stories of six deaf teachers of brasilian sign language (Libras) that have formed and works in these educational institutions for the deaf and our own journey, as a teacher and researcher. The study was conducted on the theoretical-methodological principles of (auto)biographical research in education and socio-historical studies on the social formation of the human. The corpus used for analysis was consisted of six narrative interviews conducted in sign language and transcribed into portuguese, documents and personal files and institutional. The analysis allowed us to define three hinge moments of this story: the creation of the first school for the deaf, within the framework of oralism (1980 - 1991), the passage into the Total Communication (1991 - 1995) and, finally, the introduction of Bilingualism (1995 to today). The analyzes show that the trajectories of teacher formation of the research participants reflect the history of the three schools which have costituted bilingual social spaces of paramount importance to the subjects and the deaf community as a group of linguistic and cultural minority. The evolution of this trajectory has allowed to demarcate between the two generations of research participants. The generation of heirs of oralism, which had delayed access to the Libras and lived an education referenced in oralism, whose reminiscences of childhood and adolescence are strongly marked by suffering for the lack of communication, which hinders their social and professional career until today. And the generation of the sons of bilingualism, the youngest in age, who had childhood access to Libras and education within the framework of bilingualism, whose reminiscences are not marked by suffering and have a positive vision of the future. With respect to your teac...