Social representations and teacher training

a study of theses and dissertations productions in the Southern region (2019-2023)

Abstract

This article aimed to analyze what the Postgraduate Programs in Education in the Southern region of Brazil have produced in the field of teacher training from the theory of social representations approach. For this, a state of knowledge review study was carried out, considering the production disseminated in theses and dissertations available in the Catalog of Theses and Dissertations of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel, in the period 2019-2023. Considering 66 researches, only 36 were selected (20 theses and 16 dissertations) for addressing the theme of this investigation. The respective abstracts composed the analysis corpus and were mapped in relation to the general objective, theoretical-methodological aspects, synthesis of results and their contribution to teacher training. For data analysis and interpretation, the thematic categorical content analysis technique was used, with the aid of the Iramuteq software in the Descending Hierarchical Classification option, which enabled lexical analysis, resulting in the construction of three thematic classes that originated categories of analysis. The results indicated that research uses theory  in focus to reveal important issues that affect teacher training, such as aspects related to the teaching profession, students, teaching, assessment, learning and a theoretical-methodological approach in which elements focused on research, its techniques and instruments stand out. It is concluded that, although the theory of social representations is being used with some representativeness in research in the education field, the researches that employ it bringing the mechanisms that formulate social representations (objectification and anchoring) are incipient.