Ludicidade como estratégia de ensino de ciências nos anos finais do ensino fundamental

Abstract

Elementary science education in Brazil was included in the basic education curriculum late, and the country's development was used for vocational and technical education. Thus, the need for scientific literacy is recognized, since it expands the capacity of individuals to act in the world, fully exercising citizenship. Today, the predominant methods in Science Education are contentist and traditional, distancing students from their daily lives, leading students to lose interest in the school subjects and classes. However, the use of recreational activities becomes a strategy that develops the creativity and cognitive skills of students, making them participate in the knowledge construction process. The objective of this work was to investigate, in the teaching practice, the use of playfulness as a science teaching strategy in the final years of elementary school. This is a qualitative research, carried out in November 2020. This work was developed using the online platforms Google Meet® and Google Forms®. For this, questionnaires were applied and a semi-structured interview was conducted with a group of 17 teachers from the city of Cabedelo, as long as they expressed their interest in voluntarily participating in the research, signing the Free and Informed Consent Form. The lesson plans and course plans for the academic training of these professionals were also collected. Data were collected after the approval by the Research Ethics Committee of the Health Sciences Center, as suggested by the Content Analysis proposed by Bardin (1977). The present work was developed in order to contribute to the re-signification of playfulness in this stage of education. The work took into account the ethical aspects in research involving human beings, recommended by Resolution 466/12 of the National Health Council (BRASIL, 2012b), as well as the Resolution 2/2002 of the Federal Council of Biology (CFBio, 2017), which contains the code of ethics for biology professionals. The results showed that, according to educators, playfulness is important during the process of teaching, as well as motivates students, making teaching more meaningful and less exhausted; approximating the theory to the practice, however, it was seen that the activity requires a greater dedication of the teacher in selecting the content, planning and applying the activity, while the majority of the teachers have a huge workload. The teachers considered that the lesson plan is important to achieve the proposed aims, being necessary to know the reality of the students, to face the possible difficulties that appear during the execution of the planning, making the possible changes if necessary. Regarding resistance to the development of recreational activities, there was a lack of material, little student engagement, limited class time, lack of support from the school team, among others. It was seen that, the educators did not report not presenting initial training that addressed playfulness, neither that it was approached superficially, thus using other sources of knowledge, such as the internet, continuing education, books, articles, and exchange of experiences with other teachers. Therefore, science teachers use the playfulness as a teaching strategy, even facing inefficient academic training in relation to pedagogical practices and encountering limitations in precarious working conditions.