Investigações em Ensino de Ciências (May 2020)
The concept of energy in Journals of the Sciences Education area: the discussion of the Energy concept/degradation in Freire-STS educational perspective practices
Abstract
The concept energy is widely used in our daily lives to describe and explain various phenomena present in nature. In this way, it allows us to bring an interdisciplinary and unifying approach to the school curriculum, leading to an understanding of the various relationships of our society with the environment, in which many of the changes in our ecosystem involve energy transformations in biological, physical and chemical processes. In this sense, we investigate how the theme energy (conservation / degradation) has been approached in the Basic Education curriculum? Aiming, through bibliographic research, to understand what have been the referrals in the curriculum field, given to this concept. Methodologically we follow the Content Analysis based on Bardin (1977), being the corpus composed of six journals in the area of Science Education, selected for their representativeness in the area. The results are discussed from five a priori categories: Scope of themes; Emergence of the themes; Disciplines involved in structuring the themes; Theme / content relation; Traditionally designated theme content. Through this, we verify the importance of the thematic approach and the STS assumptions for the understanding of the concept of Energy in its various areas of knowledge of the school curriculum. In addition, we found that the concept can be considered as key to addressing universal themes and promoting interdisciplinary in basic education, breaking the vision of being restricted to a content of a particular curricular component. In general, with the analysis we perceive difficulties on the part of teachers in approaching the concept, so the same remained closely linked to old traditional conceptions. However, we found that most practices were able to provide greater participation of students in the educational process, so the theme can enable the expansion of works and applications in the area offormal education, which take into account the character of social and educational background citizen, of critical-reflexive and participative subjects, able to intervene and point out the solution of problems of their community, of their lived world.
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