A Sociologia na escola: considerações a partir das representações sociais de estudantes do ensino médio no município de Natal/RN

Abstract

Visiting the commonplace of curricular intermittence that surrounds the teaching of Sociology in basic education is inevitable, especially when the proposal is to think about what images high school students construct about this subject. This instability, which is intertwined with the history of the subject in basic education, has led to a series of problems ranging from the design of a minimum curriculum for sociological teaching, to discussions about textbooks and the role of secondary education itself in this process. We questioned 149 third grade high school students in the municipality of Natal about their representations of the subject of Sociology. To talk about the curricula of basic education, how secondary education is conceived in them, how its teachers are being trained and the space that Sociology occupies in this scenario is to locate the process of construction of the image of this discipline by these young people. The theoretical-methodological framework used was mainly Serge Moscovici's Theory of Social Representations (TRS) (2012; 2013). Data was collected using the Free Word Association Technique (FWA), followed by the organization of this data into representative dimensions based on Laurence Bardin's Content Analysis (2011), which continued with the structuring of this data in the Representational Spiral System (SER), developed by Elda Melo (2019), in accordance with the Structural Approach proposed by Jean-Claude Abric (1999). As such, this research focused its discussions on the litigies surrounding teacher training, the secondary school curriculum and its changes, as well as social representations, correlating these conceptual dimensions. Regarding student representations, the data shows that high school students establish a relevance to the subject of Sociology, which is organized around the indispensability of this subject.The discourse on the relevance of Sociology as a school subject is produced in a reality that is dissonant with what students construct and it is in this context that we argue that the production of this social representation is based on a Themata (MOSCOVICI, 2012). Based on the results of this work and a survey of previous research dealing with the teaching of Sociology and social representations from the student perspective, we maintain that the positive view granted to this chair has as its source idea a Theme that concerns a crisis in Brazilian education and the issues underlying this process, such as a critical/noncritical education, an emancipatory/conservative education, antinomies that involve educational conceptions and, consequently, teacher training, curriculum, subject and society. Sociology emerges as an important subject, because the students' social representations are based above all on the understanding that, in the face of this historical scenario of educational crisis, this subject is a crucial tool in the rational and critical understanding of this reality.