Investigações em Ensino de Ciências (Aug 2020)
The research in science and mathematics education with Michel Foucault: propagation of Foucauldian theorizing in the area (1990 to 2016)
Abstract
As researchers announce the dissemination of the work of Michel Foucault in education, they also demonstrate a concern with how this framework is being used. In this sense, we are interested in understanding how the field of science and mathematics education is incorporating the ideas of the author. This work aimed to map research in science and mathematics education that develops Michel Foucault's concepts and describe how the author's work has been used in the area. We focused our research on the best-ranked Brazilian journals which address Teaching (strata A1 and A2), according to the Qualis system (organized by the Brazilian agency Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel - CAPES). We selected 26 journals which focus on science and mathematics education (n=17) or in education as a whole (n=9). We analyzed all articles published between 1990 and 2016 and selected the ones which cited the work of Michel Foucault at least once and classified them into three categories (incidental, conceptual or working mode appropriation) according with how the authors approached the work of the philosopher. We first analyzed the data of the 238 articles categorized as having appropriated the Foucauldian “working mode”. Then, we selected through keywords 18 texts to investigate deeper how the work of Foucault has been incorporated in the field of science and mathematics education. We found that his work has spread on researches in the field, which started to operate the Foucauldian “working mode”, especially since the 2000s. The theoretical and methodological appropriation of Foucault frameworks in the analyzed articles is related to the procedures of discourse analysis, however we detected a limitation in the use of empirical sources. The authors usually use the work of Foucault as a methodological tool and to do second-order critics, investing in the ideas and practices already consolidated in the field.
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