Interdisciplinarity in practices linked to STS Education: an analysis of Brazilian articles

Abstract

Within the set of research that characterizes and seeks to understand the educational repercussions of STS in the work carried out in Brazil, this article provides details about an investigation that aimed to analyze how practices linked to STS Education, reported in Brazilian journals, operate with an interdisciplinary dimension. 23 articles published in nine journals in Science Education were examined. The research is based on the STS literature and the contributions of some authors who study the concept of interdisciplinarity. The textual corpus was methodologically examined through a systematic literature review study. In the results, we characterize the practices found according to the disciplines and themes involved, the contexts of application and the type of practice developed, in addition to using a typology for interdisciplinarity to classify each work. In these works, we observed interesting experiences of applying STS Education. In a way, these are studies that seek estrategies of interacting knowledge from different areas and dimensions, but there is a lack of foundation on the concept of interdisciplinarity itself and strong difficulties for the development of collective activities. Furthermore, although interdisciplinarity is a constituent aspect of the hard core of the research program dedicated to STS Education, this dimension has rarely been the subject of attention and analysis in research that describes concrete practices within this perspective.