Sobre besouros e borboletas: os sentidos, os significados e o ensino de ciências

Abstract

Reflecting about science teaching in the early years of elementary school is imperative, considering children formalize, at this school stage, and mediated by the teacher the contact with scientific concepts. Still under the teacher’s responsibility, is the challenge of creating a critical perspective concerning scientific culture among their students throughout the process of knowledge construction, negotiating the meanings conceived by students when actively involved in teaching situations within the scope of science. Many studies demonstrate the school and science education are still moving in the opposite direction, ignoring the characteristics of scientific work and the child's investigative and creative potential, thus, perpetuating an archaic and experimental teaching that does not recognize the dialectic process involved in the construction of knowledge. In this context, committed to the desire to produce science together with the group of first-year elementary school students and bringing in my professional trajectory traits that distance me from an impoverished and linear view of knowledge, added to an enormous curiosity for the natural world, I come to the research problem: In what terms, as a teacher of the initial years, along with a group of students attending the 1st year, express our scientific knowledge while carrying out research activities on garden animals and reflecting on the senses and meanings ? Faced with this question, the following research purpose has been established and directs my focus: to investigate my own teaching practice in the first year of Elementary School, by means of classroom research, as a possibility to produce scientific knowledge along with my students, fostering scientific literacy and allowing the development of an educational product capable of helping other teachers as a reference material. I resorted to the theoretical-methodological approach of narrative research to put together the narrative fragments emerged since my teaching development period until the phase of support to the construction of meanings and senses by students when involved in learning situations, turning field texts into research texts. The data, unique and singular, were built in classroom research development context, when studying garden animals with a class of 15 students. To record the data, a narrative diary, audio recordings, activities, drawings and photos extracted from the classroom practice were used, selecting the most significant class episodes with regard to the interpretation of meanings. As a result of the process, I highlight the construction of scientific knowledge transposed into school knowledge, through a network of meanings that give sense to the reality studied, I observed the expansion of spontaneous concepts, the development of an investigative posture, the acquisition of a scientific vocabulary and enjoyment of group activities. Within this context, immersed in the pleasure of teaching and producing science, I discuss the challenges of this school discipline in school ambience, the child empowerment as a subject of their own learning, capable of producing science, supported by the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky. I also dialog with other authors who highlight the importance of scientific literacy and discard the belief that children do not have the necessary maturity and abstraction to produce knowledge. In these terms, I advocate the importance of contextualized teaching, based on an active methodology and exploration of the environment, not with the objective of offering answers but above all, with the purpose of generating curiosity, stimulating questioning and interest in science through classroom research.