The Idealization of Rural Spaces in Secondary and High School Education. A Study of Social Representations

Abstract

The theory of social representations contributes to know the discourses that influence people’s lives and how subjects reproduce that knowledge to interpret the world. The knowledge that interests us in this research is the worldview that 3rdyear of Compulsory Secundary Education and 2ndyear Baccalaureate students from the province of Valencia (Spain) have about rural areas. Their worldview comes from different sources and information contexts, so the application of social representations to the field of geography didactics is pertinent in this study. Specifically, the phenomenological approach of the Geography of Perception and Behavior joins the social representations of geographic space in its subjective and tripartite aspect (lived space, perceived space, and conceived space). This is how it is intended to understand the elements that influence the school explanation of rural spaces and their presence in the school geography to achieve two objectives: first, to know the structure and meaning of the school representation of students from ten schools in the province of Valencia; second, to check how the representation of the human figure has been captured in textbooks at those same educational levels between 1959 and 2016 and in the pictorial representations of students to show convergent trends in the elements of a social representation of these spaces. For this, 581 students from schools in the province of Valencia (Spain) answered a mixed questionnaire, with a word association test analyzed using the Evocation 2005 software. The application of the chi-square index to the analysis of the photographs of the textbooks and the drawings of the students about rural spaces reveals that there is an idealized representation of these spaces, making difficult to understand social and environmental problems.