Habitus docente e representação social do ensinar Geografia na Educação Básica de Teresina - Piauí

Abstract

The literature about the Geography teaching has shown that most male and female teachers of this subject go on guiding their teaching practice based on the traditional Geography fundamentals, whose main characteristic consist in the description of places. The incorporation of scientific standards that change the old principles and concepts have not been happening, unless in a punctual way. The overcoming of the traditional Geography, related to the aspects accepted by the scientific field have not happened in Brazil yet, not only because of certain obvious obstacles, as the literature has been pointed out but also by symbolic obstacles, which block the incorporation of the new, of the non habitual action. One of those obstacles that motivated the accomplishment of this study was the social representations that are theoretically studied here under the perspective developed by Serge Moscovici. Then, the focus of this doctorate study is concentrated in the apprehension of the content and structure of the social representation of teaching of Geography and its relation with the habitus that gives form and social visibility to the ones who are teachers of that subject in Teresina. The consecution of this work was especially based on the Pierre Bourdieu´s praxiology, mainly on the concepts of social field, habitus and capital, as well as the theory of social representations, specifically on the approach of central nucleus developed by Jean-Claude Abric and Jean-Claude Flament. The initial hypothesis pointed out the existence of a Geographer´s primary habitus built through the development process of the geographic science field in Brazil, as a basis of production of a social representation of teaching geography . That representation, however, would act as a symbolic obstacle to the incorporation of the new scientific contents and pedagogical practice, which require from the teacher investigative and questionable attitude in the presence of the reality and contents approached in the classroom. That initial hypothesis laid on the theoretical purpose that it has been developed by Domingos Sobrinho (1997), which states that there is a narrow relationship between the habitus and social representation. The study was developed with male and female teachers of Geography from public schools of Teresina. The methodology involved the use of a questionnaire, the free-word association technique and deep interviews. The achieved results showed the presence of a complex process of representational construction and its articulation with a habitus produced by the synthesis of several situational and cultural referents, from among of them we can point out an insertion in a social field of practice exclusively related to the teaching and the reproduction of a professoral teaching (SILVA, 2003), built through the school development process, which those male and female teachers were exposed. The initial hypothesis that considered the local reproduction of a primary habitus of the Geography was denied, therefore, it was verified that there is not in Teresina the production/reproduction of the structures, rules and practice of the national scientific field, in which this subject is inserted. Hence, the incorporation of the new patterns of the geographic scientific knowledge is difficult because of the inexistence of a scientific habitus, that is, mental schema systems that would let the teachers mentioned above connect themselves appropriately to the science and its practices. So, it has gotten a social representation of teaching geography based on contents strictly related to the reproduction of structures, mental schema from the educational field which attach themselves to the hegemonic pedagogical practices in the national scope