The relationship between interdisciplinarity and STS: an overview of brazilian theses and dissertations in the teaching area

Abstract

The fragmented way in which scientific knowledge is taught to students has created barriers to a critical understanding of the society where they belong. According to this, primarily interdisciplinary approaches such as the Science-Technology-Society (STS) must be debated and introduced in the classroom circumstances. This paper intends to identify how interdisciplinarity and STS were linked in academic productions published from 2011 to 2022 in the teaching area. Due to this, an analysis of 903 studies present in the Catálogo de Teses e Dissertações da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) was carried out, which resulted in the selection of 20 theses and dissertations that directly associated the two themes considering four different categories established from the Content Analysis technique. Given the results obtained, the low level of correlation observed in the analyzed studies stands out, which may be due to the polysemy characteristic of the terms and the difficulties related to this fact.