TECHNOLOGY IN FOCUS IN STS EDUCATION: A STUDY IN THE INITIAL EDUCATION OF SCIENCE TEACHERS
Nature of Technology; Scientific and Technological Literacy; Science teacher training.
Some research in the field of Education Science, Technology and Society (CTS) indicates that the proposals and analyzes of recent years tend to visualize only the elements in a secondary way (C and S) and associated only with an instrumental offensive, without the proposition of a broader and more critical discussion on this element. In this perspective, in order to give greater visibility to the element (T) - Technology, the present study aims to investigate how conceptions of Technology of Natural Sciences undergraduates from Higher Education Institutions in the State of Rio Grande do Norte. To this end, a survey was carried out on the topic of Technology in the area of Science teaching in the 2010-2020 decade; characterization as technology dimensions identified in the researched universe; and it was also sought to understand how the Technology element has been discussed in the subjects and extracurricular activities of the degree courses in the area of Natural Sciences. The present research is exploratory with a mixed approach (qualitative and quantitative) and the instrument used was a questionnaire applied remotely with the aid of google forms to 86 teachers in formation of the courses of Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Physics of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) and Federal Institute of Rio Grande do Norte (IFRN). The instrument contains open and closed questions, and in the closed we use the Likert Scale. For the analysis of the corpus, we used elements of Bardin's content analysis (1977), descriptive statistics and the aid of the R Studio Software to plot the data of the closed questions. The
emerging categories a priori were: i) Dimensions of Technology; ii) Technology in Science Degree courses; iii) Topics to work on Technology in the Science discipline; iv) Concepts of CTS Education; and vi) Technology in Science and Society. In our results, we observed that the dimension Technology as a human activity was the
most frequent, followed by the dimensions Technology as object/artifact, Technology as a mode of knowledge, History of Technology and Critical Technology being the least frequent. Although we have observed that most of the responses of teachers in training of Natural Sciences at UFRN and IFRN go beyond the common sense of
Technology (technological artifacts), which we consider positive, these mostly allud to the understanding that they still have restricted conceptions and/or or partial than the literature on the Nature of Technology suggests. We emphasize, therefore, that for the rise of the element (T) and equal value given to the other elements (C and S) of the Science-Technology-Society triad in the Brazilian context, it is necessary to propose and carry out more studies involving this theme in the initial and continuing education of science teachers in an expanded manner.