The social representations of student teachers on the relationship between theory and practice in their teacher education

This research is about the social representations constructed by students from a Normal School, regarding the theory-practice relationship observed during their pre-service education to become secondary school teachers. In educational research, this problem has been little studied from a qualitative perspective using the interview as a technique. The findings reveal, among other aspects, the difficulty these students have to explain such relationship; in words of Moscovici, they are wise amateurs as their management of authors and theories is scarce and ambiguous. This was understood when they were predisposed to cherish their experiential knowledge more than their theoretical one.