Since my academic career was based on a traditional way of teaching, in which I wasn’t stimulated to participate the classes, not showing my ideas and opinions, now as a teacher, I try to encourage my students to speak, enhancing their knowledge in the subject in focus and linking them to the information at school. Thus, guided by the idea of rescue/recover the knowledge that students
perceive in their family and cultural environment, I drew this essay as a research
about the social representations of water from 4th grade basic education students of the ‘Escola de Aplicação da Universidade Federal do Pará’, in the year of 2007. I have used the social representaion theory formulated by serge moscovici as theoretical and methodological support with the Central Core theory of Jean- Claude Abric. The methodology characterized by a qualitative and quantitative approach, had the techniques of data collection, the questionnaire, the free
evocation from the word inducing water, supplemented by the interview. The research had as subjects 110 students from the 4th grade basic education, in the ages from nine to thirteen years old, in which 60 of those are girls. The result analysis revealed important aspects about the students and their answers and enabled me to identify that the content of the water’s social representation are associated to the following meanings and senses: 1) The water consumption in the every day habits of hygiene and food; 2) To the natural landscape, formed by water resources; 3) To the natural phenomena, as the rain and the tsunami; 4) To its values and importance as a source of life and health; 5) To the concrete attitudes and actions for the water treatment; 6) To the care and preservation of
the natural water heritage; 7) To its symbolism: water as a worship, beauty and leisure object and 8) its characteristics. About the structure of the water’s social representation, the central core was constituted by the semantic categories: bath, drink, life, clean, river and rain and the peripheral system, by the categories: save, pollute, wash the food, waterfalls, make food, crystalline, entertainment, sea, peace, tsunami, useful, well and drop. The understanding of students answers about water, were essential to my thoughts about this subject and so now I can
create new pedagogical practices based on the challenge of forming studentcitizens that recognize the need of using water in a sensible way as a finite resource which needs to be maintained and preserved.
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