História da ciência para formação docente face à relação ciência e religião

Abstract

The relationship between science and religion in teaching can be initially explored from two observations. 1) Some researchers claim that religiosity has a negative influence on science learning, a fact disclosed in recent works. This observation raised in us some questions, such as: what does the teacher understand as a negative influence of religion on science learning? Is this learning difficulty really related to resistance to “scientific knowledge”? If so, why is there resistance to this knowledge on the part of religious students? Does the learning of scientific knowledge necessarily require the replacement of religious by scientific discourse? 2) It is noticed that, generally, when religion is mentioned in textbooks or scientific publications, it appears as an enemy of science and little or nothing is explored about the religious or metaphysical motivations in the scientific work of important characters in the history of Science (HC). It is believed that this caricatured view of science is one of the main causes for the difficulty of relating science and religion, as this view emphasizes a supposed conflict between these two fields. This research was developed in order to understand What are the contributions of the history of science to the formation of natural science teachers, given the relationship between science and religion? Therefore, an educational product in the form of a textbook is proposed as a way to support the training of teachers in the field of natural sciences. Our hypothesis is that HC helps to better understand the nature of science, undoing some distorted views of it, minimizing the obstacles to the learning of scientific knowledge, even enabling its interaction with the field of Religion, for example, without losses or epistemological confusion. The research, conducted with a qualitative and exploratory methodology, was divided into stages briefly described as: survey of theoretical and historiographical support on the subject; analysis of the pedagogical projects of the Licentiate Degree in Chemistry, Physics and Biology at UFMT, Cuiabá campus; floating analysis of books on HC used in these courses; construction of the textbook and consultation with research participants – graduates of the aforementioned courses – in order to know their perceptions about the subject. Through this consultation, we perceived the profile of the participants about experiences acquired in academic life; religious perspective; and, knowledge of HC and historical episodes. The religious perspectives of the participants move between the Catholic, Evangelical, and atheism religions. Difficulty with academic content was pointed out, both by those from a religious and atheistic perspective. And the participants' conception of the relationship between science and religion varies between models of independence, complementarity and conflict. All data were relevant for the construction of the educational product in the form of a textbook that follows as a proposal of incentive and immersion in the History of Science in view of its relationship with Religion.