O aluno e sua representação social do professor de matemática

Abstract

The goal of this research is to investigate the social representations of students at the final year of elementary school about their math teachers. Based on the theoretical constructs on the post-modern authors such as Hargreaves, Calloni, Zajdsznajder, Lampert, among others, and Moscovicis Theory of Social Representations, it was investigated how math teachers figured at the students symbolic system, providing ideas and thoughts, or even theories about the instructor and his work. As expectation, it was tried to find a correlation between these representations and the teaching and learning processes of school mathematics. Free association of words and semi-structured interviews with students of two elementary schools in the city of Curvelo are the methodological procedures adopted in this research, as well as the systematization and content analysis for data interpretation. The analysis of the protocols allowed to produce evidences that the center of the representational structure of the students on the mathematics teachers is constituted by the figure of the instructor as the one who explains. This feature proved to be especially linked to two others: the teacher is the one who take those questions and gives exercises. All the other features listed on the teacher are in the "periphery" of representation, provide support and strengthen the core. This result indicates that, in the students imaginary, the teacher has the primary function to provide information about the content taught and assess their understanding. One concludes that, in those students view, the teacher occupies a privileged role in the teaching and learning process of mathematics. Without the teacher, this process does not occur and they do not learn mathematics