Knowledges and practices of successful literacy teachers (Brazil, 1950-1980)

Significant changes have marked Brazilian education in the period focused on by this research. Aiming to understand the configurations of the teaching profession in that period, this work focuses on the issue of the school success in the area of literacy by means of an analysis of the practices of literacy teachers who were at work between the 1950s and 1980s. The research is based on life-history accounts. The study aimed at describing the various experiences of these teachers identifying the knowledges and practices that sustained their successful literacy work as well as the various factors of a social, religious, political, familiar or other nature that, in the history of each of these teachers, favoured the development of a pedagogical style of literacy particular to each one of them. Despite the peculiarities and originality of each history, the success in the literacy process, as the defining feature of the profile of the four teachers, results from two main aspects: first, the autonomy that each one managed to keep in the development of his/her teaching work, particularly in the organisation of the teaching practices that indicated greater chances of a pupil`s learning to read and write; second, their trust in the capacity of every child for learning, independently of his/her social, economic and cultural conditions. Based on this evidence it is argued that the success of the pedagogical work, particularly during the early years of schooling, lies in an ethics of the teaching work with a double implication: first, it requires the teachers` dedication to their pupils, and second, it requires respect for the work of the teacher, so that she/he can maintain her/his autonomy and inventiveness. These aspects indicate the need for reflection on teaching work and a review of current teacher education policies, particularly the policies targeted at teachers working with literacy practices.

Rewarded associative and instrumental conditioning after neonatal ventral hippocampus lesions in rats

Sprague Dawley rats were submitted to bilateral ventral hippocampus lesions 7 days after birth. This corresponds to the Lipska and Weinberger`s procedure for modeling schizophrenia. The aim of the present work was to test the learning capacity of such rats with an associative Pavlovian and an instrumental learning paradigm, both methods using reward outcome (food, sucrose or polycose). The associative paradigm comprised also a second learning test with reversed learning contingencies. The instrumental conditioning comprised an extinction test under outcome devaluation conditions. Neonatally lesioned rats, once adults (over 60 days of age), showed a conditioning deficit in the associative paradigm but not in the instrumental one. Lesioned rats remained able to adapt as readily as controls to the reversed learning contingency and were as sensitive as controls to the devaluation of outcome. Such observations indicate that the active access (instrumental learning) to a reward could have compensated for the deficit observed under the ""passive"" stimulus-reward associative learning condition. This feature is compared to the memory management impairments observed in clinical patients. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.