Abstract
This work is about the relationship between the intellectual purpose assigned to the discipline sociology in the high school and the representations the students of public and private schools in the Federal District of Brazil build based on their social experience with that discipline, in their school. We based ourselves upon quali-quantitative research, involving the participate observation at scholar spaces (during the sociological courses); focus groups and application of questionnaires among students from high school and documental analysis. We propose to identify the relation between two essential epistemic categories in our research, pedagogic mediations (content and didactic knowledge in sociology by the teacher) and social experience of the students about the subject in the school, so that we can deal with the specificities of the teachers knowledge in social sciences and of the perceptions and representations of the students about sociology. The relation between the pedagogic mediations and the social experiences of the students in the domain of sociology teaching in the school inform us how the theme of intellectual utility of the social sciences and its importance in the education of the high school involve critical operations which graduated in social sciences, teachers from the domain and its students realize about sociology as a knowledge domain and as a knowledge which goes to the school.
Keywords:
pedagogical mediations; social experience and representation; educational sociology at the secondary school; schools of the Federal District