Investigação de práticas ontológicas da educação em ciências em escolas do campo: diálogos entre decolonialidade e modos de existência

Abstract

This doctoral research consists of an inquiry into ontological practices of science education at two rural schools with different realities: an Agricultural Family School (AFS) and a landless workers MST rural camp school. Rural Education is fundamentally a counter-hegemonic project that opposes to the historical processes of inferiorization of rural areas and the peasants’ ways of being and knowing. In this sense, many works establish dialogues between Rural Education and Decolonial Thought, a theoretical movement that seeks to legitimize non-eurocentric views of Latin American history. Within the field of Rural Education, this research seeks to establish dialogues between Decolonial Thought, the modes of existence investigated by Bruno Latour and the Luc Boltanski and Laurret Thévenot cités. The general objective of the research was to identify the prepositions of the modes of existence and the different worlds that configure the school practices of the two partner institutions, in order to trace possible elements of decoloniality. The specific objectives were to describe the practices that occur primarily in Science teaching and the ontologies that emerge from them; understand the relationship between teaching training of Natural Sciences teachers and the ontological practices stimulated by them; investigate the relationships established by both schools teachers and students between science education and popular knowledge with respect to health, environment, food, etc.; and to analyze how materials and/or pedagogical activities can be configured as decolonial instruments or for the colonization of teaching. Face-to-face (and remote) interviews were conducted with both schools’ teachers and students, in addition to photographic records and notes in a field notebook. Particularly at the AFS, the photovoice method was used (with adaptations), in which students were able to take pictures and make narratives about certain phenomena. The analysis was carried out based on the construction of a good report containing the description of the actions and associations of different actants and the subsequent identification of elements that the theoretical framework indicates as belonging to a certain mode of existence or a certain cité. It was possible to identify, for both schools, different practices that are configured as ontologies of Good Living, whether regarding food, environmental preservation or solidarity relationships among people. Furthermore, practices that make explicit a constant crossing between worlds and modes of existence were identified; in addition to it, they reveal a permanent state of struggle of the peasants, within the scope of Basic Rural Education.