Concepciones del alumnado universitario de Educación sobre la(s) infancia(s): Constantes hegemónicas y retos disidentes

Abstract

Over time, a social representation of what it means to be a child(ren) has been built, mediated by the ideology, interests and motivations of groups with the power to organize, among others, educational systems. This article presents the results of a qualitative research whose main objective was to inform about the representations of the construct "childhood(ies)" of the students of the Bachelor's Degree in Early Childhood and Degree Primary Education and its influence on the projection of educational practices. The instrument used a questionnaire with open-ended questions was applied with a total of 299 responses. The results show an idyllic and happy vision of childhood, in which the intersectional view is absent. Children are mostly represented as people in development and future citizenship, vulnerable and without the capacity for agency. It is an essentialist and adultist conception that corresponds to the power relations that permeate them and that generate educational practices that are also idealized and simplistic. It concludes with the recommendation that teacher training must make these representations and their relationship with teaching explicit as a first step towards building other, more realistic, democratic, and egalitarian ways of doing education.