Cartography at Elementary School Level: Continuing Education of Teachers and Experiences in the Classroom - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 72

by the tutor and the teacher, although adopted in all teacher-training courses offered
by CECEMCA, presented difficulties among those involved. Teachers, in general,
have a greater mastery of speech than of writing, when it comes to giving expres-
sion to their reflections of the teaching profession and their experiences in the
classroom. This leads us to believe that this kind of difficulty in preparing records
limits teacher performance by putting obstacles in their way that they, individually
and collectively, need to overcome to transform their practices in the classroom.
These are some considerations based on the experiences of the activities undertaken
in the continuing education courses conducted by CECEMCA/UNESP.
Children from the first stage of Elementary Education develop the activities in
different manners, depending on how they interpret the teacher's request and
according to their cognitive development and their previous experiences. The
representations provided by the teachers were mostly displayed vertically with a
flat or upturned view of the objects (e.g. houses and buildings), or the pictorial
profile (horizontal view of the street with allegorical elements such as sun, clouds,
among others), as illustrated in the examples presented previously. Drawings that
depict the images from an exclusively vertical point of view are rare in this stage of
cognitive development. The confusion with regard to the presentation of different
objects is crucial in representation by this age group, which is consistent with the
literature devoted to the theme.
Our expectation is that the experience reported here, from Brazilian elementary
school continuing education courses of CECEMCA/UNESP and there resulting
reflections can contribute with other countries with similar contexts.
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