As representações sociais do vocacional: esquisso topológico das tensões no ensino profissional.

Abstract

This study approaches the vocational as a social representation. Considering that the tensions which animate it are reflected in the vocational education and training courses, this research focuses a teaching class of a Curso de Especialização Tecnológica of the Porto unit of the Centro de Formação Profissional da Indústria Metalúrgica e Metalomecânica (CENFIM). The data were collected through questionnaires to 17 trainees and interviews to a trainee, alone, and five trainees with their families, director, psychologist, two trainers and two coordinators of actions. The qualitative and quantitative analysis suggests that the vocational is organized over an innatist conception of skills, becoming an arch between learning and working. CENFIM prefigures the possibilities of change from the structured and closed space (regulated by the cultural capital) of the vocational education and training, whose prevailing representations are pejorative, to a smooth space, which gives again the signification to the process of "orienting oneself". If an ecological, constructivist and developmental perspective about the vocational psychology consecrates the self as author of the vocational project, it does not ignore that the project is constructed and implemented under the sign of human finitude and incompleteness.