Contribuições de um programa de divulgação científica para a (re)construção da visão sobre ciência de professores da educação básica

Abstract

This thesis investigates how basic education teachers’ participation in the science communication outreach project A Ciência que fazemos (CQF) at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (UFJF) relates to processes of (re)constructing views about science and its actors, in dialogue with references from the epistemology of science. Grounded in qualitative research, the study used Bardin’s Content Analysis to examine a corpus composed of audiovisual records of CQF school meetings and interviews with seven teachers from different fields, including Philosophy, Biological Sciences, Portuguese Language, and Chemistry. CQF, described as an outreach initiative that combines scientific themes with biographical trajectories to challenge stereotypes, was associated with shifts in teachers’ understandings of the nature, production, and circulation of knowledge. Findings indicate that participation in the project supports a view of science as a practice of inquiry, argumentation, and revision, with less emphasis on an image restricted to the laboratory. In parallel, the figure of the scientist tends to be described in more humanized and plural terms, although stereotypical markers remain available and often reappear as points of contrast. In the Science and society axis, science communication emerges as a central dimension of the social function of knowledge, especially in contexts of misinformation and denialism, by highlighting the need to make scientific processes, criteria, and justifications understandable and open to public discussion. Regarding teaching practice, participants report changes in how they present science in the classroom, including vocabulary adjustments, expanded repertoires, and greater openness to cross-disciplinary connections, with CQF being recognized in some cases as a continuing professional development experience. The thesis concludes that CQF has formative potential by fostering reorganizations in views about science, scientists, and the public circulation of knowledge. At the same time, sustaining these transformations depends on the continuity of the actions and on institutional conditions of teachers’ work, which helps explain the differences observed among participants.