Ensino de biologia por investigação na formação de professores: análise de práticas epistêmicas em uma atividade didática com o tema biologia celular

Abstract

Higher education in Brazil was considerably late in its development, and graduates only emerged in the 1930s, as a result of their concern with the regulation of teacher training for secondary school. Research shows that some difficulties in teaching faced by teachers of science and biology in basic education, to some extent, reflect some problems in conducting mediation processes in the classroom, through the use of significant methodological resources. Thus, the development of active methodologies, among them experimental investigations, have been sought in order to provide the student with the development of cognitive processes, motivating him to think, ask, experiment, reflect and contextualize, making him an active subject in learning process, especially in school contents or more abstract and difficult to understand subjects, as is the case of subjects in the field of cellular biology. Authors have analyzed and discussed how epistemic movements occur in the classroom, especially in higher education, and present the discursive interactions between teacher and student and the students among themselves. Thus, the present study seeks to analyze epistemic practices during a didactic activity based on research in a context of teacher training in higher education groups. The didactic approach had as its theme the activity of the plasma membrane and was developed in a class of the penultimate period of the course of Degree in Biological Sciences at the Federal University of Paraíba. The data collection instruments used were questionnaires, audiovisual documentation and report production of applied didactic activity. The epistemic practices in the context of the discursive interactions and in the production of the activity report were analyzed based on categories from the classic and updated literature of the area. The result of the questionnaire presented that the students obtained a satisfactory knowledge about the subject, allowing a greater in-depth in didactic activity. The practical activity had a duration of 110 minutes, the teacher's speech percentage was 67.3%, compared to 32.7% of the students, with a greater presence of content and procedural speech. The communicative approaches were of the interactive / dialogical and interactive / authority type with intentions varying according to the stages of the activity. The epistemic practices presented in the context of discursive interactions were descriptions, explanations and generalizations and the epistemic practices included in the reports of the practical activity were to cite, to problematize, to construct data, to argue and to conclude. It is concluded that the use of the biology teaching approach through experimental research and the analysis of epistemic practices allow future teachers a theoretical and methodological repertoire that can mobilize important tools for the production, communication, evaluation and legitimation of the scientific knowledge addressed in classroom. In addition, this approach has a great potential in teacher training, in order to print the necessary movements for the processes of mediation and the development of rich classroom interactions and for decision making.