Traditional knowledge and science teaching in Quilombola School Education: an ethnobiological study

Abstract

The relationship between human beings and the environment results in the generation of knowledge that is linked to the local culture and is of fundamental importance to be considered in the educational formation of the individual. This research aimed to identify, based on ethnobiology, how students from a public and quilombola school located in the city of Goiana, Pernambuco State, Brazil, know and represent the biodiversity of their community, and describe how this knowledge contributed to the teaching of science through intercultural dialogue. Through the action research methodology, students were asked to produce a drawing that represented their knowledge of local biodiversity and described it through textual production. The collected data proceeded to the content analysis in an analytical-interpretative perspective. The identified knowledge was grouped into categories of analysis and then contextualized through the planning of didactic sequences applied in classes of early years of elementary school. The results indicate that quilombola students have traditional knowledge related to their environment, specifically the mangrove ecosystem and other aspects of the Atlantic forest. It can be noted that this knowledge establishes direct relations with the scientific knowledge in the school, which when considered in the classroom, contributed to the teaching of science based on the intercultural dialogue between traditional and scientific knowledge from an ethnobiological perspective, revealing the relevance of the contextualization of knowledge in science teaching as a proposal for teaching work in the context of quilombola culture.

Keywords

• etnobiologia
• diálogo intercultural entre conhecimentos
• processo de ensino e aprendizagem
• manguezal