Building the teacher's competences higher education in Brazil: an analysis of trajectories of business school teachers

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, the demand for higher education in business administration has increased in Brazil, providing benefits to private universities. While this environment offers great opportunity for business schools, it also entails a number of challenging issues that impact the value chain of education. Understanding that people are the great differential of successful organizations, the objective of this article is to reflect on the need for private universities to seek in their teaching staff bases for competitive advantage. Based on the concept of professional competencies, it is argued that the competences of teachers are strictly related to their context of action and should therefore be identified and developed by university management. As a theoretical contribution the studies of Perrenoud (1998), Tardif (2000) and Shugurensky (2006) were used. Thus, the article explores, through a case study, the determining factors for the construction of teacher competencies from the perspective of teachers. The results showed that teachers attribute to classroom practice the greatest difference in the training of their competences, to the detriment of collaborative and institutional factors.