STS education and risk - possible approaches in materials produced by chemistry undergraduates

Abstract

This work aimed to analyze the inclusion of risk in high school chemistry lesson plans, from the STS education perspective. The teaching proposals were prepared by three groups of students from the Chemistry degree course linked to the Pedagogical Residency Program (PRP) at the University of Brasilia. Teachers and students discussed repeatedly lesson plans from these proposals before they were developed in the classroom. In this manuscript, Textual Discourse Analysis methodology was used to evaluate an assessment carried out by student groups under the theoretical scope of the proposals and some lesson plans. The inclusion of risk was covered in the lesson plans as a favorable aspect for discussions and reflections on STS relations. Furthermore, understanding the triad of knowledge, values, and activity in working with risk proved to be an important ally in training those involved, re-signifying the role and limits of science and technology. Despite the advances in teaching proposals, we identified students’ difficulty in breaking away from classes focused on decontextualized content. These classes, common to the traditional science teaching model, do not answer to minimally think about and debate today’s society and the risks arising from scientific and technological advances.