Abstract

CHAVEZ HERTING, David  and  MIERES CHACALTANA, Manuel Santiago. Social representations of democracy and citizenship in southern Chile’s undergraduate pedagogy students. Rev. Actual. Investig. Educ [online]. 2017, vol.17, n.2, pp.144-171. ISSN 1409-4703.  http://dx.doi.org/10.15517/aie.v17i1.28202.

This article presents the results of an investigation whose objective was to identify and describe the representations about democracy and citizenship of a group of undergraduate pedagogy’s students, in order to provide a first background for the discussion on the relevance to include a clear strategy of citizenship education for these careers. The study has a qualitative methodological approach. It was applied to 249 students from the Faculty of Education at a regional university of southern Chile. The technique used was a Natural Semantic Network and analysis was made on the values thrown by such networks. We inquired about the representations of "democracy", "citizenship", "Chilean political parties" and "democracy in Chile". The results show that young people represent democracy as an adequate system of social and political organization and citizenship as its valid form of expression. However, by focusing attention on the Chilean reality, the expression of democracy in the country is discredited. They also represent negatively Chilean political parties. We observed a clear break between the ideals of democracy and citizenship concepts and their concrete application to the Chilean reality. These results allow a first approach to the political conceptualizations of students to design a policy of initial teacher training that includes civic education.

Keywords : social representations; democracy; citizenship; undergraduate students..

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