Day care’s teachers and their representations about children from 0 to 3 years

Abstract

This research aims to identify and interpret the social representations of kindergarten teachers about 0-3 year old children. The Social Re-presentations allow us to anticipate certain actions on how the subject is po sitioned towards a situation, for his structured way of studying a world’s conception, symbols, images, opinions and beliefs draw a social model, with a hierarchical pattern on these elements, which shows in a predictive form a tendency in the subject’s behavior, or in other words, an orientation for action. It is a both a mixed and empirical research, in which took part 73 kindergarten teachers, in a municipal schooling system from Sao Paulo. As a tool we’ve used a questionnaire and a free association technique of words. The quantitative analysis was performed using the software IRAMUTEQ, and it was based on the organization of classes - Dendogram, correlation words - Similitude, Word Cloud and Prototypical Analysis of words. Later, the data were subjected to Content Analysis (CA). The results were summarized in three themes, namely: Aspects related to the limits and rules; Family Contact and Cognition. For the participating teachers contemporary children proved to be more intelligent, active and connected to technology, but on the other hand they lack the delimitation of limits and rules and family life time.