Um estudo das representações sociais sobre o trabalho docente dos licenciandos do curso de Ciências Biológicas da Universidade Federal de Uberlândia

Abstract

This research was conducted in the Biological Sciences Major Course of the University of Uberlândia having as objective the study of representations on the teaching work of the course students. It is a qualitative investigation that used the Social Representation Theory as a methodological-theoretical reference framework in the Moscovician perspective. That made it possible to approach the subjectivity of the individuals researched as well as their representations. For data collection a questionnaire was applied to 168 students, 21 of each course term and, in a second moment we had a semi-structured interview with 16 students, two of each term. We decided to combine the quantitative and qualitative data, a resource often used for data analysis. That makes it possible to have a more complete view of the phenomenon studied. The questionnaire quantitative data and the interviews were qualitatively analyzed. Their discourses were analyzed according to Bardin s content analysis technique. Results showed that the students share the same representative referential regarding the teaching work, what can be explained by similar experiences in the course of Biology of UFU. Among the representations we could find that: teaching work is hard, but gratifying and covered of great importance, although it hasn t been recognized; it is associated to teaching and not to research, being teaching understood as content transmission; nonmotivated teachers, who are not well prepared, not well paid, besides having no autonomy, negatively contribute to the educational process; students who are not interested and not prepared, absence of their family in school activities, and non contextualized teaching are factors that impede students learning; interaction teacher-student-school-family-community is essential for the learning success which does not depend only on cognitive aspects but also on affective ones; teachers training, both on specific contents and on the pedagogical ones is of great importance for a good teaching work; parents see the teaching profession positively, while friends see it in a negative way. The option for the teaching work guarantees a job in the market place, and, for that, they do not give up this opportunity, when facing the uncertainties of a researcher career. This research does not end with the possibility of future studies on this theme. However, we hope that this work can contribute for the discussions on the teaching work in the teachers training courses.