O que é ler na disciplina ciências da natureza?: um olhar sobre práticas de leitura promovidas na sala de aula de um professor em início de carreira

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the reading practices promoted by a natural sciences teacher in the middle school level. We call the participant teacher Mr. Sunday. He was teaching in the Adult Education system in a 25 students class inside a outreach university project. The school and the university are situated in the southeast region of Brazil. Our research is a naturalistic inquiry and we adopted some ethnographic research tools/strategies. We collected our data through participant observation, with technological registers complementing the field notes produced, such as video and audio recording. We also kept copies of the activities delivered by Mr. Sunday and some texts produced by the students. We conducted an one-hour-long interview. Event maps and timelines were elaborated for the observed classes, such as some transcriptions word-by-word. First, we focused in the characterization of the reading activities. Through these analysis, we perceived that Mr. Sunday held a complex notion of reading. Reading process couldn't be reduced to information extraction from the written text. Learning science through reading needs, besides reading itself, group discussion, writing about the issue read, to read other texts, and present for the class (talking about what was read for someone else). Group discussion had a central role, since it was the way the teacher expected the students to produce their own texts and the presentation. We chose a five class sequence in order to analyze the discursive interactions between teacher and students. The focus at this moment was in the intertextuality construction. A set of categories were constructed out of the different kinds of discursive interactions observed in these five class sequence. Therefore, it pointed the reading phenomena in this class as an intertextuality practice. Mr. Sunday talked differently with each student or group. The discursive social construction of intertextuality links happened as the teacher oriented the groups. The intertextuality construction process was related to other activities, such as the writing of a new text, and the oral presentation for the whole class. So, the intertextuality is a practice acknowledged as essential for an appropriate reading in the community. Finally, what counts as reading in this science classroom in the Adult Education comprises writing and intertextuality practices. Reading isn't just to decode a written text, and extract from it information. According to the activities planned by Mr. Sunday and developed in the Adult Education classroom participant, reading is a phenomena of engagement in an actions dynamic that moves among the individual to the collectives instances.