Milton Santos and Paulo Freire in Education in Sciences: the form-content expressed in the Generator Theme

Abstract

In the Teaching of Sciences proposals of curricular reorientation have been elaborated with the objective of contributing with a contextualized education involving more and more aspects of the students' experience, for example those that contemplate some assumptions of Paulo Freire. In addition, research has pointed to the importance of considering joints between the Freirean perspective and other theoretical references, with the purpose of producing new knowledge for educational research in a humanizing perspective. For example, the relations between the ideas of Paulo Freire and the geographer Milton Santos, based mainly on the conception of social formation of space. In this sense, we investigate contributions of the concept content-form, established by Milton Santos, in the identification of Generating Themes. For that, a formative process of teachers of the initial years of a municipal school of Itabuna/ BA was carried out, focusing on the teaching of sciences, in which it developed the stages of thematic research. The information was obtained through informal conversations with residents and video recordings of the training course, which were analyzed through Discursive Textual Analysis in which the following categories were obtained a priori: a) form-content in coding-problematization-decoding and b) expression of form-content in the Generator Theme. Among the results, it is worth noting that the content-form concept presented by Milton Santos and the concept of epochal unity, systematized by Freire, are complementary insofar as the form-content enhances the Thematic Research process, and it is possible to understand the spatiotemporal specificities linked to social relations and the local problems experienced by the students. The recursiveness of the stages of codification and decoding, in the context of these theoretical articulations, allowed a new understanding of the limiting situations, which came to be seen, by the teachers, as amenable to transformation.

Keywords

• Paulo Freire
• Milton Santos
• Ensino de Ciências
• Ensino Fundamental