Educators or teachers in the future? A study on the social representations of the Language Course academics from UFAM/Humaitá on teaching career.

Abstract

This article presents the results of a research accomplished at the Federal University of Amazonas, Campus Vale do Rio Madeira, located in the city of Humaitá/AM. This study aimed to investigate what are the social representations on the Teaching Career of the academics of the double degree in Portuguese and English Language and Literature, taking into consideration the teacher as the subject of knowledge and as a important social actor in the school context. The methodology that we used was qualitative and quantitative. The instrument was a semi-structured interview consisting of two parts: the first part was made to identify the students choice and they were able to list their reasons and their influences on their choice for the course in question, (these aspects were tabulated quantitatively). In the second part it was used the “inducing word" that allowed the actors to express their representations about teaching profession (these data were analyzed qualitatively, since the objective was to understand the subjectivity involved in speech). The analysis of collected data allowed us to find various motivations for the ingress in the course, in addition we could notice that many students did not want to be taking this degree which leads us to a worrying reflection on the future commitment of these individuals with education.