Integral Formation for the 21st Century: a case study from the perspective of neglected content in science teaching

Abstract

The present study has as its guiding question: what implications can the neglect of content in science teaching have for the integral formation of students? As an objective, we seek to investigate the main needs and difficulties that students present for an integral formation and the way in which teachers supply or not such aspects. The investigation is qualitative in nature and was carried out in public schools in the metropolitan region of a city in southern Brazil, fitting as a case study. To meet the research objective, semi-structured interviews were used as data collection instruments, starting from a confrontational question, and direct observation of classes, as proposed by Yin (2005) and Flick (2009). The collected data were transcribed into a corpus and analyzed using the Discursive Textual Analysis described by Moraes and Galiazzi (2011). We sought to focus on the presentation of the emerging category “the contents and their impacts on the integral formation of the subject”, which presents a greater number of arguments related to the guiding question and the objective of the investigation. The category in question was divided into two subcategories: difficulties and other factors involved in students learning and aspects of relationships in the classroom.