Teaching Scientific Argumentation: A Study on Teaching Knowledge in Initial Formation
Argumentation, Meta-strategic knowledge of argumentation, Teacher education.
In recent years, studies involving argumentation and different goals for science education have diversified around teaching sequence proposals. There are also international political indications defending their insertion in the science classrooms. Although literature has emphasized the importance of its teaching and there are political indications, we know that promoting it in science classes is not something simple. The lack of teacher knowledge on the part of teachers to support students' arguments has been identified as a major obstacle. One of the possibilities to develop these knowledge, and more specifically, those related to meta-strategic knowledge, can be to act in the Teacher Education (TE). Thus, the development of this knowledge is defended through a TE course, engaging the graduates in explicit discussions about the general characteristics of the argumentation. For that, the convergence of History and Philosophy of Science-Argumentation was adopted as a didactic position. In other words, the use of History and Philosophy of Science (HFC) was adopted as an approach to promote the engagement in argumentative processes and the epistemological understanding in the graduating. This thesis aimed to study elements of the knowledge of future teachers for the routine insertion of argumentation in science classrooms. The theoretical reference was the works of Anat Zohar about the teaching knowledge in the context of teaching strategies of thought. Regarding the methodological decisions, the Discursive Textual Analysis (DTA) was adopted for the treatment of the data. The corpus came from 11 documents, audio and video recordings of 12 meetings, audio and video recordings of 3 interventions for high school students and 2 interviews with undergraduate students of the subproject-physics of PIBID-UFRN. Among the main results, due to the unique nature of this type of knowledge, it was proposed to use a special term: teacher knowledge for the routine insertion of argumentation as a strategy of high order thinking. And from it, two other denominations: the first, pedagogical knowledge in the context of the teaching of argumentation as a strategy of high order thinking, and the second, the knowledge of argumentation as a strategy of high order thinking. In relation to the first, a specific body of knowledge was proposed, among which 5 teaching knowledge that “emerged” during the analysis. In relation to the second, in particular, the meta-strategic knowledge of the argumentation, 8 teaching knowledge was proposed for this body of specific knowledge.