O conceito de motivação em dizeres de professores de língua inglesa

This work aimed at analyzing the speeches constructed about motivation by English teachers who teach at public state schools in the interior of Minas Gerais. We aimed at delineating the concept of subject underlying the subjects’ notion of motivation and identifying the role that the English teacher attributes to himself and to the student when he/she enunciates on motivational issues, problematizing the possible consequences of these issues for some English teachers while working in public schools. In order to do so, our investigation made use of theoretical assumptions from Applied Linguistics and Discourse Analysis. The theoretical fundamentation deriving from Bakhtin Circle as well as from Michel Pecheux’s theoretical basis were also very relevant for this research. The intersection of these studying fields entails a theoretical construction that considers the voices of those who live the social practice (MOITA LOPES, 2006), which allows one to see the subjects through their heterogeneity, fluidity and fragmentation. Moreover, it generates knowledge about language in its political, ideological, social and historical aspects. AREDA (SERRANI, 1998) was used as a theoretical and methodological framework for data collection. In our analysis, we considered the voices and the conditions of production that constitute 5 English teachers and, from some selected speeches extracted from their discursive production, some notions as intra and interdiscourse, discursive resonance, discursive memory, among others, can be seen interwoven. We hypothesize that the production of meaning deriving from these English teachers comes from a cleavage between the interdiscursivity about motivation and their position in relation to the English language. Some of these teachers’ discursive inscriptions were delineated as they follow: i) the silenced motivation, in which the teachers come up with several voices, repeating what that has already been said about motivation through silence by excess; also, through an inscription in a process of anomy, the English teachers silence motivation, as they come up with other sayings, in an anomic order, denying their identification with their mother tongue and culture because of a desire to learn the foreign language and culture; ii) the motivation in/from/ by others that resounds, in the way the teachers speak, a relation of alterity on what, in/from desire of other relations (colleagues, students, teaching materials, media, etc.), other forms and alternatives are established as a guarantee of students’ motivation; the teachers are also inscripted in in-service practice training as a space of educational development, because they imagine that the experience of the in-service practice alone, which excludes the educational instruction from the Languages course in which they graduated/were graduating at, taught them how to motivate the students; iii) the motivation as a will of power/knowledge, which means there seems to be teachers’ inscription in the relationship between power and knowledge (Foucault, 1996), disconsidering the conflicts that constitute the English classroom to say that there is a control of the English teaching and learning process and, as a result, they also sustain that they hold control over how to motivate; furthermore, the presence of a resonant voice, whose effect is given by an inscription on the (illusion of) completeness can be seen, because the English teachers believe that while motivating their students, this motivation will provide them with all the missing elements, which would mean that when they motivate students, they would be able to fulfill all the gaps in their learning process.

Identidade pessoal em Hume e em Kant

The issue of this dissertation is the problem of personal identity. More specifically, the objective of this work is to investigate and compare how Hume and Kant construct, within their own philosophical systems, their theories of personal identity (of the self), so that these theories can set the grounds for the construction of theoretical knowledge. Hume’s theory of personal identity is closely connected to his empirical model of investigation, according to which no metaphysical conclusion can be accepted. This implies a very specific limitation to the humean description of personal identity. Because he can’t find a safe empirical reference for the self, Hume is obliged to describe it as a mere fiction, which the imagination creates to try to give unity to the set of perceptions that composes the mind. Kant, on the other hand, constructs his theory of the self with the aim of explaining the possibility of the a priori knowledge in Mathematics and in Physics. Kant tries to find which attributes must necessarily belong to the self so that this self can be, at the same time, the a priori transcendental condition of a subjectivity in general and the equally a priori transcendental condition for the construction of objective knowledge. Moreover, Kant shows the impossibility of objectively knowing, as intuition, the self, and limits himself to the description of the self as a mere subjective consciousness of the synthetic capacities of the understanding. Several disparities, thus, can be perceived between the theories of personal identity of these two authors. Based on these differences, the present work also examines the possibility of making an interpretation of the humean theory of the self by using elements of the kantian philosophy. The purpose of this kind of interpretation is to propose a solution to the difficulties faced by Hume in the description of his theory of personal identity.

A influência do amortecimento viscoelástico na estabilidade aeroelástica de painéis aeronáuticos

Since the creation of supersonic vehicles, during the Second World War, the engineers have given special attention to the interaction between the aerodynamic efforts and the structures of the aircrafts due to a highly destructive phenomenon called flutter in aeronautical panel. Flutter in aeronautical panels is a self-excited aeroelastic phenomenon, which can occurs during supersonic flights due to dynamic instability of inertia, elastic and aerodynamic forces of the system. In the flutter condition, when the critical aerodynamic pressure is reached, the vibration amplitudes of the panel become dynamically unstable and increase exponentially with time, affecting significantly the fatigue life of the existing aeronautical components. Thus, in this paper, the interest is to investigate the possibility of reducing the effects of the supersonic aeroelastic instability of rectangular plates by applying passive constrained viscoelastic layers. The rationale for such study is the fact that as the addition of viscoelastic materials provides decreased vibration amplitudes it becomes important to quantify the suppression of plate flutter coalescence modes that can be obtained. Moreover, despite the fact that much research on the suppression of panel flutter has been carried out by using passive, semi-active and active control techniques, very few of them are adapted to deal with the problem of estimating the flutter speeds of viscoelastic systems, since they must conveniently account for the frequency- and temperature-dependent behavior of the viscoelastic material. In this context, two different model of viscoelastic material are developed and applied to the model of sandwich plate by using finite elements. After the presentation of the theoretical foundations of the methodology, the description of a numerical study on the flutter analysis of a three-layer sandwich plate is addressed.