Currents of STSE Education in Integrative Projects in a Natural Sciences and Technologies textbook

Abstract

Considering contemporary socio-environmental challenges and curricular changes in the Brazilian educational scenario, Integrative Projects, which have emerged recently to support the improvement of the quality of education, are incipient in the curriculum, requiring teacher preparation to implement this interdisciplinary perspective in the educational context. To achieve this, teacher training and the support of textbooks are essential. STSE education can provide a robust theoretical ground for the educational purposes of the curriculum for teaching science. However, textbooks also need to be assessed on their ability to contribute to achieving the educational objectives of national curricula. Therefore, in the present documentary, exploratory and qualitative research we aimed to investigate the main aspects of the STSE education of a textbook on integrative projects in the area of Natural Sciences and its Technologies. We adopted content analysis to discuss possible contributions of this textbook to improving the quality of education, from the STSE perspective. The main results indicate a predominance of a STSE education focused on epistemic scientific literacy, valuing the application of scientific knowledge and technologies to solve problems, and devaluing the ethical and political dimensions of the content, in addition to the absence of the specific aspect on environmental education and integration between human beings and the natural environment. We concluded that there is a need for more in-depth studies on this topic, as well as investment in teacher education, so that teachers can adopt this textbook from more critical perspectives.