As representações dos professores e estudantes sobre a Sociologia no Ensino Médio: investigando as comunidades virtuais do Orkut

Abstract

This study investigates the representations teachers and students have of Sociology in secondary school using the virtual communities from Orkut. The concepts of discourse analysis from Michel Foucault and of representation from Stuart Hall were used for the analysis. The concepts of power, knowledge, discursive formations, statements, scientific area and habitus, the last two developed by Pierre Bourdieu, were also essential to the analysis. The theoretical framework approached the trajectory of the discipline within the school curriculum; from secondary school polices to the representations of the students, including the characteristics of social networking and virtual communities, tracing the origin of the concept of community. The chapter regarding the methodology narrates data collection in a virtual world, the selection of the communities analyzed and the subjects of the research and the organization of the analysis of thirty seven texts extracted from nine virtual communities, three from Sociology teachers and six from students. They were: Dogmatism as a characteristics of the Sociology in secondary school; Instrumental Rationality in Education, which talks about the use o sociological knowledge in life, in tests to get at university or in the work; the statements and the trajectory of the sociology as a discipline in secondary school; the methodological assumptions; the issues regarding the graduation in Social Sciences; and the values given to the different scientific areas. The history of discontinuity of the discipline of Sociology in secondary schools seems to be one of the causes of the problems faced by the teachers nowadays, calling the attention the issues regarding teaching methodology, the selection of the syllabus and specific bibliography to be used in secondary schools, and the depreciation of teaching courses. These statements allowed the identification of the discourses that traverses the representations of teachers and students. These discourses allowed the formation of the representations that teachers and students have about the discipline of Sociology in secondary schools. The data collected and analyzed here suggests that the assumptions regarding the graduation courses in Social Sciences and Sociology are worrying. A graduation course in Social Sciences should have its own identity if it is to form a teacher in Sociology and not a sociologist, not a social scientist and not a researcher.