Sciences from the Perspective of High School Students

A Case Study

Abstract

This summary is the result of reflections from the research developed between 2018 and 2019 as part of the Institutional Program of Scientific Initiation Scholarships in High School (PIBIC - EM), aimed at students from technical high school courses at IFG. The investigative line aimed to understand how students perceive the meaning of the practical action of science through formal fields of study. The concern revolves around the appropriation and decoding of school content, and how students constructed and deconstructed their experiences and organized themselves socially. It was found that scientific knowledge is still organized into stereotypical "boxes" of concepts and categories, and that individuals entering high school did not show practical knowledge of science in their lives, or even understand that science exists in their daily routine, as they perceive it as something distant and only done in laboratories. Our analysis revealed that the teaching-learning process still bears strong marks of traditional education, and that new ways of interacting with school content and its decoding are needed, promoting dialogue between the praxis of the social world, the reality of the students, and the scientific content worked, thereby building values, ideas, and practices inherent to a school education for a just society. The research methodology was qualitative research, using individual questionnaires. The answers were decoded with the help of authors/scholars on the theme, including Carl Edward Sagan, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Michel Paty, among others, to ground the interpretations of the study.