Democracy, Dialogue, and Critical Thinking: Freirean categories for Science Education

Abstract

In this text, we propose an epistemological discussion with pedagogical implications for the teaching of science from the educational thought of the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire to rethink the teaching of science in the contemporary Brazilian reality. For this purpose, nine of the author's works were analyzed, from which analytical categories aimed at reflecting on the formation of the subject in science education were extracted: Democracy, Dialogue and Criticality. In the face of the advance of conservatism and denialism, we defend the thesis that the more science teaching promotes that the learner exercises the ability to express himself, dialogue and question, the more he will advance from a "naïve curiosity", which characterizes common sense, to an "epistemological curiosity", in which scientific knowledge is situated. It is concluded that teachers who teach Science today can guide their practices from Freire's thought, developing educational actions that involve the construction of democratic spaces based on dialogue and that aim at the critical formation of students in a perspective of human emancipation.