Images and scholar cultures: Views of internship students in a Science Teacher Education Program in Brazil

The goal of this work is to investigate representations of the school institution held by graduate students of the Science Teacher Education Program at a public university in Brazil. We aim to answer the following questions: What are the representations of the school institution imagined by the researched students? How important are those representations to the process of teacher education? We analyzed 79 sketches made by the students in the period 2011 to 2013 during their internship program. Students complemented their sketches by brief oral and written narratives about them. Using qualitative analysis of social representations about school institution from a cultural and historic perspective, we identified three major and not exclusive conceptions of school: 1) the school environments produce an open-close play, with various levels of control and disciplining; 2) the pedagogical relationships are associated to teacher authority, disciplining and transmission of knowledge; and, finally, 3) the objects of the school point to the idea of the school institution as an isolated environment, with its own culture. The presence of these representations indicates the prevalence of a long process of production and recognition of aspects of the scholar culture by the students, which could contribute to reflexive practices in the proposals of teacher education programs.