Reading in the social representations of Early Childhood Education teachers

Abstract

Contemporary society is characterized by the volume and speed of communication and information that circulate daily, and reading is one of the vehicles through which social and cultural productions are presented to people. Thus, reading is an object that requires investigation, since it can be configured in different ways in social representations. It is possible to better understand this phenomenon by studying its elements, which contributes to social and educational processes. This paper aims to discuss reading, based on the social representations of Early Childhood Education teachers from a region of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. The text addresses the reader model, the relationship with reading, the books that stand out, and the average number of books read, according to the representations of the 77 teachers participating in the research. The instrument used for data collection was a questionnaire hosted on Google Forms with closed and open questions, including the free association of words related to the theme. The qualitative research was based on an exploratory descriptive study, and we used content analysis to select, categorize, and analyze the empirical data in light of the Theory of Social Representations. The results show that most participants see the teacher as a model reader; a portion of them do not appreciate reading. However, 43% of teachers read more than the national average. The data demonstrate the importance of the teacher's role in the construction of representations about reading and the need for an initial and ongoing teacher training policy regarding the universe of reading and literature.