Building knowledge in teacher training of Chemistry undergraduates, through focus on STSE

Abstract

This paper refers to an action research implemented in the discipline of Chemistry Teaching Methodology, involving 15 students of the Chemistry Degree Course, from a public institution of higher education in the State of Paraná - Brazil. For its realization a didactic sequence (DS) was applied, supported by the guidelines of Zabala (1998), which dealt with the STSE movement and its approach to teaching contextualized chemistry, aimed at developing the undergraduates’ conceptual, procedural and attitudinal knowledge. This paper will merely focus the conceptual and procedural analysis. Data was obtained from: i) questionnaires with open questions to identify the academics’ initial and final conceptions about chemistry teaching purposes; ii) teaching units produced by undergraduates to assess the procedural learning. The qualitative analysis was based on the Text Analysis Discourse (Moraes; Galiazzi, 2011). The analysis shows that the DS led to significant achievements regarding the questioning of the initial conceptions of academics, predominantly simplistic / reductionist; however, data also indicates difficulties regarding the procedural contents, relating to “know-how”. Such difficulties proved to be linked mainly to weaknesses related to the specific knowledge of the chemical content and the prevalence of conservative and centralist attitudes about teaching and learning. Results show that the inclusion of differentiated teaching proposals in undergraduate courses must be persistent and mainstreamed in order to gradually break with conceptions and crystallized models of teaching during their school and university education, thus helping them to acquire the necessary knowledge for the current demands of education.