Teaching Practices and Social Representations: Being a Teacher in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This paper aims to broaden the discussion on the relationships between social representations and teaching practices, analyzing the representations and practices of the teachers of Early Childhood Education in five cities in the interior of Paraíba, northeastern Brazil. As a theoretical and methodological reference, we adopt the structural approach of social representations based on the Central Nucleus Theory of Abric. Methodological procedures were the questionnaire of free association of words and the interview of simple autoconfrontation. The first instrument was applied with 86 participants in the five municipalities of Paraíba (Juazeirinho, Asunción, Junco, Soledade and Campina Grande), and the second one was applied with eight teachers from the cities listed above. The results point to the existence of a relationship between what the teachers think, the social representations and their action in the classroom. The analysis of the data points to the thesis of the existence of a relationship between the social representations and the teaching practice. This leads us to believe the possibility of changing social representations from a reflection on practice.