Aproximações das representações de Ciências por estudantes da Educação de Jovens e Adultos em comunidades rurais de Tefé-AM à Etnociencia

Abstract

This thesis presents the results of a field survey conducted with students and teachers involved in educational activities for youth and adult education groups (EJA) in three municipal schools located in Bacuri, Nossa Senhora do Perpétuo Socorro, and Santa Cruz, rural communities in the municipality of Tefé, Amazonas. The objective of this research was to investigate representations of natural sciences curriculum content in the shared reality of rural EJA students in Tefé’s municipal schools and the implications resulting from contextualization. The guiding point of this analysis was wise knowledge, in other words, scientific knowledge represented in the curriculum and primeval knowledge (produced in/from action) as evidenced in the daily life of the research subjects. The study was qualitative and ethnobiological in nature, and its theoretical and methodological base was the theory of social representations. Data was collected through participant observation, with these observations recorded in a field journal, combined with analysis of the narratives of interviews with educators, community members and students, focus groups, and analysis of syllabi and classes. The most representative strategy for revealing the problem was analysis of the contextualization of teaching natural sciences content through the bias of the ethnobotany narrative of the students. Analysis of the data showed close ties between the quality and the dimension of the representations of the science curriculum content in the schools under study and the conceptions of contextualized teaching which were present in the syllabus for EJA groups in Amazonas. The study also showed that the content of the narratives exhibited profound idiosyncrasies around the ethnobotanical knowledge of the individuals studied, knowledge that still needs to gain repercussions in schools in the field in the youth and adult education modality so that it can allow greater interaction between the teaching of natural sciences and the reality of the riverside communities in which the EJA students in the municipal schools of Tefé dwell. Consequently, the results affirm the importance of contextualization as a methodological directive, but these conceptions of contextualization should be broadly debated since their demarcation will lead to pedagogical activities that can broaden or reinforce conduct and representations of students in this modality which consider their cognitive, cultural, and environmental realities.