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Social Representations; Rural Education; Teacher Training; PROCAMPO; Teacher Education.
This study is situated within the field of educational policies and teacher education
promoted by the Rural Social Movements, focusing on the Program to Support Higher
Education in Rural Education Teaching Training (PROCAMPO). The research was
conducted in the state of Piauí, in the municipality of Floriano, at the Federal University
of Piauí (UFPI), Amílcar Ferreira Sobral Campus (CAFS), with the aim of analyzing the
social representations of Rural Education held by teachers of the Degree Course in Rural
Education – Natural Sciences (LEDOC). The research group consisted of 11 tenured
professors, whose profiles were characterized in order to understand how they have been
becoming familiar with the concept of Rural Education and what their social
representations of this object are. A theoretical-methodological path was outlined based
on the theoretical and normative frameworks of Rural Education, Brazilian educational
legislation, and Social Representations Theory (SRT), particularly through the
sociogenetic (or processual) approach associated with the studies of Serge Moscovici
and Denise Jodelet. As an investigative strategy, the study was developed within the
framework of qualitative, exploratory-descriptive field research, supported by the
following data collection techniques: the administration of a Teacher Profile
Questionnaire, the conduct of Semi-structured Interviews, and the analysis of the
Pedagogical Project of the Degree Course in Rural Education (PPC/CAFS/UFPI). For
data analysis and interpretation, Angela Arruda’s Contextualization Spiral technique was
used. The findings showed that teacher education in the context of LEDOC faces
challenges and difficulties concerning the understanding of the concept of Rural
Education and the course’s theoretical-methodological and operational proposal. From
the analysis of the configuration of social representations, it was observed that the notions
of Rural Education underlying the views of the teachers surveyed are anchored in two
dimensions: the formative dimension (regarding its educational and professional training
functions) and the spatial-geographical dimension (which grounds education in a more
“physical” place and less in a “social” sense of belonging). Although these two dimensions
show a certain coherence, they reduce the broader meaning of Rural Education when
teachers associate the representational field of the object with the view that it is linked to
a course that trains people who live “in” the countryside and “for” the countryside, whereas
this relationship should be understood as “of” and “with” the countryside, that is, as an
intertwining of subject/education/countryside. The teachers’ “behavior” reinforced the
confirmation of the thesis that the education of teacher educators in LEDOC strongly
influences what they do and accomplish, through the knowledge they have already
acquired, as well as through their beliefs and values constructed within the environment
and/or social group to which they belong.