Gênero e representações sociais sobre identidade profissional de estudantes de Pedagogia

Abstract

The historical process of feminizing the teaching profession is reflected in the shaping of Education as a feminized major, which leads to social representations that qualitatively associate it to the female gender. Grounded in Cultural Studies in Education, Feminist and Gender Theories, and Social Representations Theory, this quanti-qualitative study aims to assess how gender pervades social representations of the professional identities of 47 graduating Education majors from morning, afternoon, and evening programs at Federal University of Paraíba (João Pessoa Campus). It consisted of a survey in open questionnaire format, as proposed by Ioannis Tsoukalas (2006). The use of the structural approach of social representations, to assess its formation process, combined with the quanti-qualitative analysis of its products shows that gender acts as a constitutive and constituent element of social representations organized around teaching as its core. However, by expanding the concept of teaching to include other areas of occupation for educators, women represent teaching as it relates to management, whereas men show preference towards research. Moreover, the link between affection and devaluating characteristics of the profession is better perceived by women, stemming from the female condition itself. Thus, it has been demonstrated that men and women, despite their construction of social representations around teaching, arrange them through distinct peripheral elements. As a contribution, the study underscores permanence and transformation in the social representations of the educator’s identity as it relates to gender, aiming to promote strategies for change in these representations and in the teacher training curriculum itself.