Overview of socio-environmental issues and STS education: indications from theses and dissertations in science education in Brazil

Abstract

The link between Science, Technology and Society (STS) education and socio-environmental issues is extremely important for promoting a broader and more critical understanding of the relationships between science, technology, society and the environment. CTS education involves an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to develop students’ critical thinking, ethics and social responsibility in relation to scientific and technological issues that affect society and the environment. Thus, this paper presents a documentary research carried out in the Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations and in the CAPES Theses & Dissertations Catalog on socio-environmental issues and CTS education, with the research objective of describing an overview of research in science education in Brazil that articulates CTS education with socio-environmental issues. As an analytical procedure, we opted for Textual Discourse Analysis, which allowed us to systematize the information in order to explain it without generalizations. In total, we found 12 academic master’s dissertations, 18 professional master’s dissertations and 5 doctoral theses. The research that forms part of the corpus of analysis had different focuses of analysis and results that differed from one another, which were grouped according to their nature and the specific content of their approach based on similar elements: i) changes in behavior in relation to socio-environmental issues; ii) the importance of knowledge of the environment; iii) proposals based on context and with a focus on social implications.