Ensino e aprendizagem em sociologia: representações de professores da rede pública estadual de Natal

Abstract

The effective presence of Sociology as a subject of Basic Education in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, is linked to the obligation which arose with the 2008 law. The intermittency which proceeds this period caused, in the Social Sciences degree at UFRN, as well as degrees in other IES, certain distance between the the training path perpetrated in the academic environment, directly interfering in teaching/ learning concepts raised by teachers. With the aim to relate the knowledge learned through initial training and conceptions of teaching and learning in Sociology at the Elementary School, we investigated 21 teachers of this discipline who works in the state educational system in Natal - RN, about their representations on sociological teaching and learning. In this sense, we did a survey of the curriculum structure of the degree in Social Sciences at UFRN, the training buttress of the investigated subjects, and the analysis of the elements that structured the central core of representations about teaching and about learning. Therefore, as methodological approach, we used the technique called “Técnica de Associação Livre” – TALP – (Free Association of Technical Words), semi-structured interviews and observations with field diary, in addition to the called “Teoria das Representações Sociais – TRS - (Social Representation Theory), Content Analysis and Structural Approach as main analytical references. Thus, we are guided primarily by teacher training, teaching and learning relations, and their? social representations, conceptual dimensions pursued in this research, aiming to highlight the relational character between them, including the training path as determining the relationship of the educational process and representational elaborations. The data in this regard show that the representations of Sociology teachers on teaching and learning of the subject are organized around a position of criticism and disclosure of social relations, but also are structured from the imperative of objective reality and any problem that comes from this. The discourse of transformation and social intervention through the subject is recurrent. It is assigned to this discourse a monumental paper on the conditions under which it is operated in the Basic School. The teachers’ representations about the teaching / learning in Sociology, therefore, are anchored in a practice committed to a social intervention that seems to be the prerogative only of this subject issues to support the discussions in the formulation / reformulation of curricula that make these teachers, in order to place them in the reality of teaching / learning sociological, seeking greater consonance between the initial training and teaching practice.