Continuing Education for Professional Development in Higher Education Teaching

Abstract

This paper presents a qualitative research of the case study type that was held with professionals from various fields of knowledge (law, nursing, administration, education, accounting, medicine, physical therapy, journalism, economics, engineering, etc.), undergraduates who participated in a continuing education course, specifically, a specialization in continuing education to work in higher education in a community institution. The research problem that guided the research was: What are the contributions, implications and impacts of continuing education for teaching in higher education from the perceptions of professionals from various fields of knowledge? The research aimed to analyze the professionals’ repercussions of the process of continuing education for the practice of teaching in higher education. The research involved three classes of specialization of the following years: 2013, with 25 students; 2014 with 22 students and 2015 with 23 students, totaling 70 subjects investigated. Data were collected from a questionnaire with open and closed questions which has enabled content analysis from the perspective of Bardin (2011) with the help of Atlas Ti software. The results showed that the participation in the continuing education course contributed to teaching in higher education through the possibility of obtaining pedagogical knowledge and practical application of these, which culminated in a reflection on pedagogical practice, impacting directly on the professional work of these teachers, who only felt the lack of a more detailed work with the education of the distance mode.