Caracterização de ações docentes favoráveis ao ensino de Ciências envolvendo argumentação

Abstract

Researchers in science education have emphasised the potential benefits of using argumentation to support the development of students conceptual knowledge and comprohensive views of science. It also seems that there is a consensus among those researchers on (i) the importance of the teacher's roles in creating and carrying out argumentative situations in their classrooms; and (ii) the need that teachers have knowledge concerning argumentation in order to teach science from an argumentative-basis perspective. These two points motivated us to study one teacher's knowledge concerning argumentation from regular teaching situations carried out by her. Our research is mainly focussed into teacher's actions that support argumentation-based teaching manifested by thet teacher, and their relations with the teaching strategies that she used whilst teaching some scientific curricular contents. Additionally, we try to establish relations between the teacher's actions that support argumentation-based teaching manifested by the teachers and the opportunities that students had to develop their procedural and apistemic knowledge. We identify 48 types of teacher's actions that support argumentation-based teaching, which are divided according to their nature into four themes: process, structure, function, and support. This set of actions is applied as an analytical instrument in this study. For gathering data, we observed ten lessons in a second medium level year class. In those lessons, three curricular topics were discussed from distinct teaching strategies. All lessons were video-recorded, and the researcher made field notes. A dditionally, the teacher was interviewed during the collection of the data. From the integration of suvh distinct types of data, we wrote a case study about that teacher's practice. The case analysis shows that she manifested different types of teacher's actions that support argumentation-based teaching, being more frequent those related to the process of justifying and assessing scientific knowledge claims from available evidence. We identify thet there are relations between the actions manifested by the teacher and the teaching strategies thet she used. We also conclude that the actions concerning the theme process can contribute to the developmente of student's procedural and epistemic knowledge, and that actions concerning the themes structure and function have the potential to support the developmente of their epistemic knowledge about the argumentative practice. From the conclusions, we generate a new version of the model Knowledge for Teacher's Actions through Argumentation, and we highlight contributions to teacher's educaton focused on argumentation, as well as to the literature that discusses teacher's knowledge thet are essential for carrying out argumentation-based teaching.