Social representations of undergraduates about teacher identity and work: a gender perspective

This study discusses data collected from undergraduates in pedagogy and teacher trainingdegree programmes on their representations of teacher identity and work. The study is partof a project being developed by the International Centre of Studies on SocialRepresentations and Subjectivity – Education (CIERS-ed), whose objective is to identify howthese students define their future practice through analysis of their social representations ofteaching work. The study is based on the theory of social representations proposed by SergeMoscovici (2003). Two methods of data collection were used: the «formation of groups» taskand the «directed word classification» task. The results indicate that male and female stu-dents share some representations about teaching. There were also indications of differencesaccording to students’ gender and type of course.