KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CREATIVE THINKING IN CONTINUING EDUCATION FOR ELEMENTARY SCHOOL TEACHERS

Abstract

Creativity is among the most demanded competencies for the 21st century and has been incorporated into the Brazilian National Common Curricular Base (BNCC) as an objective of all basic education; even so, teachers in the Final Years of Elementary School are often expected to develop it without their continuing education preparing them to do so. This article aims to investigate how Knowledge Management (KM), through Terra's (2005) seven-dimensions model, can contribute to identifying the institutional conditions that favor the development of creative thinking in the continuing education of these teachers. The research is qualitative and exploratory, conducted in a private school in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro. As an instrument, a five-point Likert-scale questionnaire was applied, with 24 variables distributed across the seven dimensions of KM, complemented by semi-structured interviews; the data were treated in an interpretive and theoretically oriented manner, without statistical generalizations. The results indicate a moderate overall degree of agreement regarding the presence of these conditions (overall mean of 2.89 on a 0–4 scale), with Organizational Culture being the most highly rated and Learning from the Environment being the weakest dimension. It is concluded that Knowledge Management offers a structured framework for treating continuing education as a continuous institutional practice of creating, sharing, and recording knowledge, turning the development of teachers' creative thinking into a deliberate object of school management.