A ciência escolar como instrumento para a compreensão da atividade científica

Abstract

This thesis reports a research aiming at investigating how school science should be changed in order to effectively contribute to fostering an understanding of science as a human collaborative enterprise. The learning environment designed and implemented gave rise to relatively successful and wide-ranging teaching and learning experiences, and provided the background from where empirical data were constructed. At the same time it stimulated me to go further in weaving the theoretical basis that allowed me to delineate an epistemology potentially productive for teachers and educators in developing new practices in basic school science education. My thesis is that modelling, dialogicity and metacognition are at the core of any strategies devised to promote the development of epistemological reasoning of students and their images about the nature of science. With them, I believe to be possible to foster scientific culture in classroom settings in order to constituting cognitive values and epistemic commitments that will serve as guidelines to sophisticate students' knowledge about natural phenomena and about the ways we investigate them. Besides that, these strategies may stimulate students to considering and co-ordinating perspectives different from those they endorse, as well as to learning to pose problems, to present criticisms and to demand reasoned and intelligible arguments from the others. These are influential contributions for the education of moral and intellectual autonomy of students, a commitment I assign to the basic school level. These may be reached through the co-ordination among the learning sciences, learning to do science and learning about science.