Ensino técnico e capacitação profissional: um estudo sobre representações sociais no Instituto Federal do Amapá

Abstract

This paper presents a masters research accomplished with the students of the Federal Institute of Amapa, on the assumptions of the Theory of the Social Representations and the Estructural Theory of the Social Representation. The research had the goal to investigate the social representations of Technical Education and Professional Training for the participants of the Formation Program. The Social Representations Theory, created by Moscovici in 1961, aims to explain the social representation phenomenon, the common sense knowledge, socially developed and shared, with the goal to make the objects of the reality familiar to a group of individuals. The Structural Approach assumes that a representation possesses a double structure, split in central core and peripheral system, and assigns to each one specific characteristics in the representational sytem operation. The Free Evocaction, a free association technique developed by Pierre Vergès, was used to identify the semantic universe of the related words (technical education and professional training) in a group of 75 participants, besides, a socioeconomic questionnaire was used to identify the profile of the program‟s students. With the aid of the software Evoc 2000®, used to analyze the results of free evocation, the main words associated to the researched words were identified, according to the frequence and order of evocation standards, which were used to elaborate a chart with the possible distribution of the evoked words, according to their centrality. The results show a possible relation between technical education and professional training, observed by the presence of similarities in the words and the answers given by the participants explaining the reasons they choose those words. To technical education were associated words that imply that education is something that belongs outside the individuals, while to professional training were associated words that imply that is something within the individual or a personal quality. The semantic universe of both words, implies a professional education view that is restricted to the labor market, to prepare the students to work in a certain job, bound to the existence of propitious circunstances. Given the limits of the method that was used, the results were not conclusive, but we hope they can contribute to the development of projects and actions that aim to ensure the permanence of the students in the Federal Institute Amapa.