Teacher, Professional or Educator: the Conception of Special Education Teacher in the Academic Productions of the Specific Field of Special Education (2000-2016)

ABSTRACT: In this paper we intend to present a study on the production of knowledge regarding Special Education teachers in Brazil from 2000 to 2016. Our objective is to analyze how the conception about this particular kind of teacher is being disseminated through academic research. It is a bibliographic and qualitative research, theoretically and methodologically based on historical-dialectical materialism. We used a review of academic research as a methodological procedure for the collection and analysis of data, which contributed to the selection of academic papers and initial analysis of the concentration of these works by year, location, faculty and research groups. Within the 16 years covered by this research, we selected 24 works including theses, dissertations, scientific papers and papers published in event proceedings, which focused their analyses mainly on Special Education teachers. These works allowed us to highlight the imprecision of how this particular kind of teacher is named, which, to a large extent, indicates the conception of teacher hegemonically disseminated at the beginning of the 21st century. In the analysis of the selected papers, we highlighted three ways of naming the Special Education teacher: the teacher, the professional and the educator, which, in short, demonstrate an extended conception of teaching and the correlation of academic research with the proposal of the educational policy in force.