Tendências de consideração moral e ensino de ciências: veiculação e perspectivas em uma sala de aula no município de Ouriçangas-Ba

Abstract

The growing socio-environmental problems experienced today demand that humanity‟s behavior and attitudes towards the relationships it establishes with nature be considered. Thus, studies on teaching ethics in science education and its possibilities are fundamental. Therefore, this work contributes to promoting the teaching of ethics in science education from the perspective of aspects of moral consideration trends. Located within the scope of Moral Philosophy, these tendencies are structured in categories that explain the attribution of intrinsic value to beings or systems. In their expansion, the categories of moral consideration tendencies are hierarchically sequenced into individualism, selective anthropocentrism, anthropocentrism, sentiocentrism, biocentrism, ecocentrism and socio-ecocentrism. In science classrooms, the approach to these categories includes the attitudinal dimension of the content and can be included in teaching processes, given their very epistemic nature. Thus, our study aimed to understand how knowledge of the categories of moral consideration tendencies is conveyed in a class in the final years of elementary school in the municipality of Ouriçangas-BA. Our interest in this context of investigation is justified by some of the particularities of the place, given that the school is the only one in the municipality that covers the final years of elementary school in an essentially rural town. A total of 47 hours of lessons were observed during the second cycle of the Natural Sciences subject, with audiovisual recordings and field notebooks. During that time, potential topics for conveying the investigated aspects were discussed. According to the methodological theoretical framework used, a Multilevel Discourse Analysis Method based, among other lenses, on the Theory of the Structure of Human Activity, the teacher‟s discourse was characterized according to her Discursive Orientations, her Didactic Discourse Procedures (DDP) and the roles she assumed. As a result, we identified that the teacher conveyed aspects of categories that occupy the last hierarchical levels in the sense of their expansion, specifically biocentrism, ecocentrism, and socio-ecocentrism, favoring the purpose of teaching ethics in an implicit and contextualized way. In addition, she took on the role of Counselor, demonstrating an appropriate stance from an ecocentric view of moral consideration. Her speech was predominantly explanatory, with some narrative passages through which she created an atmosphere of closeness with the students. Our study presents what happened in a science classroom environment from the point of view of teaching ethics. Thus, it has potential both from an academic perspective, as a theoretical and methodological subsidy, and for teaching work. Discourse studies such as ours make reviewing teacher‟s discursive practices possible and can contribute to supporting investments and didactic and even curricular implementations.