Mudanças climáticas como Tema Controverso: estudo de caso em um curso de formação de professores de Física

Abstract

By using controversial issues in the classroom, teachers tend to share opinions or promote challenging points of view that arouse strong feelings in students, offer the opportunity to discuss and understand more deeply about topics, increase awareness and critical thinking. Therefore, to create a more democratic learning environment, it is necessary to develop knowledge with the potential to provide the necessary understanding for the analysis and discussion of potentially controversial issues, allowing the student to learn critically. Thus, we aimed to investigate the potential use of controversial issues as a didactic pedagogical situation in classrooms in a course of continuing education of physics teachers. For this, we guided the work from the theory of Meaningful Learning and Controversial Issues with a delineation of a qualitative case study where it was taught a course of continuing education of teachers that contemplated the controversial themes in the classroom. Data collection was performed through questionnaires analyzed by the content analysis of Bardin (2021), with the participation of four high school physics teachers. From the analysis, we identified that practically all participants recognize the importance of activities to discuss controversial topics in physics classes. However, they showed some resistance to changes in habits in relation to practices for working with such themes and the adaptation of time with the great extension of school programs. The course promoted contributed to the training and development of skills necessary for a teaching of physics that provides critical analysis of the themes, which suggests the importance of actions such as continuing in their didactic knowledge on the approaches, methodologies and activities most appropriate to teaching and possible reflections on the purposes of physics teaching.