TEACHER’S APPRECIATION: POLITICAL PRIORITY, TENSION OR UNCERTAINTY?

Abstract The article aims to analyze the representations of teacher appreciation by senior Pedagogy students. In the first part, we reflect on teacher appreciation in educational policies, based on the description of the teaching profession in Brazil and its “instability”, taking the political ideology as a “social constant”. In the second part, we use the Theory of Social Representations and the understanding of educational policies, from the Core Nucleus Theory, in order to understand how the social representations of senior Pedagogy students on teacher appreciation are structured. Finally, we traced the research paths and, through prototypical analyzes, we studied the social representations of these students.