Social Representations of Teaching Vocation

Abstract

What is a teaching vocation? This research tries to characterize social representations around teaching vocation of students of Pedagogy belonging to a traditional Chilean university (2016-2017), reflecting on the importance, meaning, origin and use of the concept in the narratives of these students. The research uses a non-experimental, exploratory and transversal qualitative methodology to characterize the social representations of the participants, through the application of an online questionnaire and focus groups. The main findings indicate that there is a lack of clarity when delimiting the meaning of teaching vocation, attributing a property of "entity" to something that cannot be accurately described, but that most of the participants recognize as an important element in teacher development. It is interesting the way in which participants characterize the vocation, recognizing it as a dynamic factor over time and influenced both by internal (motivation and expectations) and external variables (future work context, teacher training institution and pedagogical scenarios).