Indicadores qualitativos da argumentação dialógica e educação pela pesquisa no ensino de ciências

Abstract

To invest in teaching argumentation skills in the classroom is a relevant contemporary demand that has been challenging teachers from several areas of knowledge, including Sciences. Theoretically, the benefits attributed to the development of argumentation skills are well developed, but there is still little research dedicated to subsidizing teachers with suggestions capable of triggering, mediating, and evaluating the argumentative processes that take place inside the classroom. There is a predominance of studies aimed at complying with structural standards recommended for the constitution of arguments, and those studies understand argumentation as a product. There is also a major focus on the persuasive purposes of argumentation, which has impacts in the classroom, since there is a reproduction of how argumentation is approached by other areas of knowledge inside schools, in an unthinking way. Starting from a broad view of logical and rhetorical aspects, the present investigation addresses multiple perspectives of the theme and focuses on what is still lacking, namely, the dialogic perspective. Through the dialogic perspective of argumentation, this research aims at offering an important reinterpretation of the purposes behind teaching argumentation at schools, advocating dialogism as a qualified possibility of approaching the theme in such contexts. By shedding light on didactic issues, this research finds convergences between the emerging theoretical recommendations found in dialogism and the foundations of Education through Research. Therefore, using the Dialogic Argumentation approach in the classroom, the present investigation gathers and articulates references from the field to offer qualitative indicators for teaching Sciences through Dialogic Argumentation. Guided by the principles of Textual Discursive Analysis, these references are analyzed under a new interpretive understanding of their elaborations. The design of this research had as main objective to build qualitative indicators for the development of dialogic argumentation in Science classes based on Education through Research. Thus, it aimed to answer the following research question: What theoretical categories guide teaching actions towards the development of dialogic argumentation in Science Teaching? The results produced by this study are qualitative indicators to be used by teachers that are interested in Dialogic Argumentation and that follow the principles of Education through Research. The qualitative indicators are: problematizing knowledge; encouraging student participation; analyzing the initial emerging information; requesting and exploring justifications, counterpoints, and objections; making referrals; systematizing discussions; reflecting on the processes; and analyzing the reconstructed knowledge. These indicators were used to evaluate a sequence os classes elaborated by the principles of Education through Research. It was noticed that the qualitative indicators gathered in this research were present in the teaching actions, reinforcing the points of contact between the school formative approach and the dialogic perspective of argumentation.