O 1.º Ciclo do Ensino Básico: Que identidade(s)? Currículo, Práticas e Formação Docente

Social representations can be understood as significance systems used in the orientation of individual actions or even as a reference for the categorization of people and events (Jodelet, 2001; Moscovici, 1998). Those conceptions are built, even by those who are taking the first steps in the educational experience that is the daily attendance of school, as a result of various influences beyond the cognitive resources: social speeches, the media, school traditions or the subjectivity associated with the historical and socially situated marks (Moscovici, 2001; Jodelet, 2011). And inevitably, those are what allow, in day-to-day life, the identification as a social group, the communication with others, the giving of meaning to daily interventions, either the meaning of the teachers’ materialized practices or the behaviours adopted by peers in the classroom (Castorina, 2017; Flick e Foster, 2008; Wagner et al., 1999). Thus, the goal of this work is to present the representations built by 22 students, attending the 1st cycle of Basic Education in portuguese schools, about their current teacher, as well as the idiosyncrasies associeted with the teachers’ profession. Their perspectives emerge as meaningful elements to analyze and conceptualize that which has been defined, socially, as the identity of teachers, right away through the drawings and words of those who are just now starting school attendance. Methodologically, the investigation has a mixed character (involving qualitative and quantitative data analysis), based on the answers of the students to a questionnaire wih three different questions: a traditional one, with a free and more extensive answer; another for association of words; and a less usual one, that required the individual drawing of the teacher. The collected data often represent a female teacher who has an important job, centered in learning, similar to the perspective of Roldão (2005). Aditionally, two symbolic elements can be recognizes as structural: i) the black board, as a special highlight in the classroom with the students centrally looking at it; ii) the pointer, as an instrument exclusively used by the teacher.