The Education and Training Courses in Portugal were created as a positive discrimination measure to combat school failure and dropout. Created in 2002 the Education and Training Courses have assumed great relevance in the Portuguese education system for young people aged between 15 and 18 years old, with erratic pathways or at risk of dropping out school. This measure provides an education and professional qualification allowing insertion into active life. All of these characteristics have imposed a range of challenges to schools and teachers. First of all, this measure carries a heavy stigma due to the social and scholar attributes of the population, such as its working class origin, low parental education attainment, lack of motivation, indiscipline and economic adversities (Alves, et. al, 2012). Second of all, being a measure with a professional qualification, social and educative actors tend to refer to it as a measure that promotes facilitation and that does not prepare students for further education. Several studies (Alves, et. al, 2012; Mesquita, 2010; Nóbrega, 2010)  point out that this social devaluation and stigmatization is present not only in the society, in general, but also, and in more depth way, inside the walls of schools.

In this paper we seek to understand and analyze the social representations and the teachers’ experience in Education and Training Courses, considering for this purpose the ways by which  teachers adapt, constrain or reinvent their professional identity and practices and also how they interpret their emotions taking into account the challenges of dealing with a particular kind of student population.

For this purpose we based our analyzes in the two fundamental concepts – social representations and teachers’ experience taking into account not only the teachers’ identity but also the emotional aspect of being a teacher. We understand social representation as a form of collective creation that gathers together a system of values and ideas and seeks to establish a particular order in a material and social world as also to enable the communication between people who are part of it (Moscovici, 2004; Jodelet, 2007). As claimed by Moscovici (2004) the interest in the study of social representation results in the challenge to start to analyze the values and ideas which are in the origin of a social representation. So, the idea that social representations are a combination of a structure that is present even before the thinking and/or the tradition that defines what should be thought is particularly important to understand the challenges by which teachers’ in Education and Training Courses have to face.  Is there a particular social representation in the schools where they teach that affects or potentiate the professional practices? If so, how this particular social representation could or couldn´t affect the teacher investment in the classroom? And this particular social representation is shared by all members of the teaching staff and more important by the principal?

Furthermore, we understand teachers’ identity as a complex and dynamic process composed by a continuous interpretation and reinterpretation of one’s proper experiences and values. As states Dubar (1997) and teachers’ identity is marked by a relational process which is characterized as an open, negotiated and liable to be reshaped and reconstructed. Positive or negative emotional aspects should be considered in the analysis of teachers’ experience, since emotions and feelings on profession are determinants to build teachers’ identity. Teaching both in general and vocational education, have they  a fragmented identity? Due to the characteristics of this population which emotions they consider different from other publics and how it does affect their experience? 

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