Education, Science, Technology, and Society (STS) in textbooks: an overview of Brazilian research

Abstract

The objective of this work is to present an overview of Brazilian research on Science, Technology, and Society (STS) in didactic textbooks (DT). This is a segment of a research project being developed in a Postgraduate Program in Teaching at a university in southern Brazil. The research is bibliographic, of a basic nature, with a qualitative approach. It is worth noting that, to achieve the proposed objective, the research corpus was created by mapping the works already defended and available in the databases of the Catalog of Theses and Dissertations of CAPES and in the CAPES Periodicals Portal. Furthermore, it is important to highlight that STS Education, as it is currently conceived, has its origins in the so-called STS movement, which occurred in Europe and North America in the early 1960s. This movement was established through the organization of categorizations, and the work will be based on the categories that emerge from the studies of Aikenhead (1994). The proposed objectives of STS Education enable teaching to develop methodological actions in conjunction with DT to provide a formation of critical and reflective citizens towards society. It can be concluded that the majority of didactic textbooks used in Brazil address the STS relationship at different times, both through the valorization of issues related to the advances of science and technology and their impacts on society, and through the rescue of environmental, cultural, and social problems involved with scientific content.