Percepções sobre ciência tecnologia e sociedade na formação inicial de professores de ciências da natureza

Abstract

The increasing presence of technological artifacts in our daily lives highlights the need to understand the connections established among Science, Technology and Society - STS. There is a growing consensus that it is the task of scientific education and science education to prepare citizens for the understanding of the technical and social dimensions of the scientific-technological phenomenon, the so-called Scientific Literacy. To better qualify science education and meet this demand it is important to provide science teachers with theoretical and methodological tools that bring them closer to the STS approach. This research discusses the experimental development of a didactic-formative action (DFA), in the context of the pre-service teacher training about STS. The aim of the DFA was to encourage future science teachers to adopt the STS approach. It was organized in four thematic sections: the scientific rationality, the technological development, the STS movement and the STS scientific education. These sections were structured considering conceptual interdisciplinary knowledge and links with socio-scientific issues. The DFA was offered as a distance education course for 36 under graduates in Natural Sciences - Biology, Physics or Chemistry. Two methodologies were used: one for the development of the intervention and another for the evaluation of its results. The first one sought to meet the requirements of Waks (1992) in the Responsibility Spiral, which develops cyclical stages for the organization of activities that promote social responsibility in socio-scientific issues. The evaluation of the contributions of the intervention was based on the Discursive Textual Analysis (MORAES, GALIAZZI, 2011), through which four discursive categories were inductively identified and analyzed: Science and Technology, Scientific Education, Social Participation and Science and Technology Policies. The results point out that the development of the themes proposed through the DFA allowed the students, in general, to advance in the questioning of conventional ideas about science and technology and to weaken the technological manichaeism, problematizing aspects of their appropriation and development. The resulting educational product - Topics in Science, Technology and Society Course, is identified with the Didactic Action itself and is composed through the compilation of materials elaborated and used in the research.