A interdisciplinaridade na formação docente: investigando contribuições de um processo de formação continuada de professores da área de Ciências Naturais a partir do tema Nanociência e Nanotecnologia

Abstract

Interdisciplinarity is a perspective that has been defended in order to overcome the excessive fragmentation of knowledge in many spheres of society. In the Brazilian educational field, this conception has gained relative prominence beginning the 1990s. However, despite several studies and curricular guidelines pointing out its importance in schools, there are still many difficulties for the development of interdisciplinary practices, what can be connected to the training of teachers, still strongly marked by disciplinary logic. We begin from the hypothesis that the Teachers’ Knowledge, defined by Tardif (2014), articulated to the modalities of interdisciplinarity, pointed out by Lenoir (2013), can contribute to the implementation of strategies with formative potential, aiming at the development of interdisciplinary teaching practices. Thus, this work aims to investigate the contributions of a continuous training process for teachers with a focus on training for interdisciplinary action, based on the theme Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (N&N). In addition, we seek to understand how the teachers participating in the courses develop an interdisciplinary practice, as well as how they appropriate N&N related concepts and approach them in the Basic Education. Therefore, the subjects of this research were the teachers who participated in ongoing training processes offered in 2015 and 2016, as well as the students of these teachers after offering classes involving N&N. The data were drawn from audio recordings and video of all course meetings, materials produced by teacher's students (posters, written assessments) and interviews with two teachers, and then analyzed from the perspective of the Analysis of Content. Regarding the pursuit for the process of continuous formation, we verified that the participation of the teachers was motivated by the unfamiliarity about the N&N theme and that most of them valued the interdisciplinary work, but reported for the development of interdisciplinary practices, such as time and the own disciplinary training. We also observed that the process of continuous education contributed to the development of diverse knowledge by participants, specially by encouraging the contact with different areas of academic and professional training and the experience with colleagues who had different experiences and learning paths, forming what we call "Interdisciplinary training environment". In addition, throughout the meetings of the training processes, teachers had the opportunity to evaluate their practices based on some theoretical references, seeking greater balance between theory and practice. We also verified that the stimulation for the development of N&N teaching sugestion made it possible the mobilization of several knowledge, which may have contributed to trigger processes of appropriation of concepts and didactic transposition, favoring future approaches in the classroom. The results described above indicate that actions aimed for the mobilization of different knowledge, articulated to reflections on interdisciplinary practices from the N&N, have formative potential concerning the development of interdisciplinary teaching practices.