The child and the teacher in Early Childhood Education: representations of Pedagogy students

Abstract

Taking Moscovici and his follower’s social representations (SR) theory as support we intend to investigate the interference of initial formative processes in the representations that future professional teachers have and build on the pedagogical work in early childhood education. We adopt as specific goals: to identify how the social representations about the teaching profession, the specificity of the pedagogical work and the children to whom they will be teaching are structured by the students in the Early Childhood Program of the School of Education at FCT/Unesp and at CPAN/UFMS; to analyze continuities and transformations in social representations (SR) during their preservice education, seeking to identify if the formative process and the educative practices adopted can cause changes in the previously existing SR; and to compare the students’ representations. The study, of a longitudinal characteristic, will follow the students between the years 2009 and 2012, using questionnaires, narrative text and semi-structured interviews as instruments for data collection. The data will be processed with the aid of statistical software (EVOC, Alceste and SPSS) and according to the technique of content analysis (BARDIN, 1977). We found among the students from the two universities SR that do not suit either the young children teacher profile or the commonly accepted concept of the child/childhood in contemporary society.