AN APPROACH TO SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS OF SCIENCE IN UNIVERSITY TEACHERS

When assessing the role played by universities in scientific and professional training, it is essential to discuss not only about the contemporary scientific debate or teaching itself, but also about those representations that university teachers attribute to syntactic knowledge of the content. The aim of this work was to identify the social representations that teachers have of science in a context of university professional training in a university of high complexity in Chile. A mixed approach of exploratory and descriptive scope, focused on multiple case studies, and a homogeneous sampling design by degrees of similarity were used. Twenty-six teachers from different areas of knowledge participated, with prior informed consent. For data analysis, the technique of natural semantic networks was used. From a total of 165 defining words, eight meanings emerged that presented greater frequency. Of these, the word with the greatest semantic weight was 'knowledge' (SAM=164), followed by 'research' (SAM=75) and 'innovation' (SAM=43). By analyzing the distinctions between meanings in different areas of knowledge, it was possible to identify that basic sciences give greater semantic weight to 'creativity, social sciences to 'discovery' and health sciences to 'methodology. The results reveal meeting points in the social representation of science that university professors have, which allows to reflect on those transversal notions in scientific disciplines.