Banca de DEFESA: SILVANA MARIA LIMA DE OLIVEIRA

SCIENCE TEACHING: TEACHING ACTIVITY AND CRITICAL AWARENESS

Teacher training. Critical Consciousness. Teaching activities.

This thesis presents a study inspired by the researcher's experience in the classroom and her reflections during graduate program, with the objective of to comprehend how professional science teachers construct their pedagogical practices/activities for the formation of students with critical awareness. Assuming the importance of Paulo Freire's concept of critical awareness in teacher training processes, we welcome it as a theoretical reference together with his psychological development, according to Luria. The data consisted of activities produced by teachers from the municipal education network in the city of Catu - BA for classes in the 8th year of Elementary School. The analyzes took place in a qualitative way and from the perspective of content analysis, aiming to identify characteristics that could direct students to the development of critical awareness. The analyzes showed that, despite their limitations, the activities: (a) dealt with relevant themes and contextualized in the students' reality; (b) stimulated curiosity, perception, attention, memory and intellectual activity as a whole; (c) enabled students to go beyond the appearance of facts, reflect on their deep reality and elaborate opinions. The texts and proposed questions are contextualized, based on scientific knowledge and dialogic. We understand that the ideal mediator in this process of building critical awareness is reading, as it moves cognitive aspects that enhance the individual's critical thinking capacity. We concluded that the teachers were committed to the teaching activities, built quality teaching material and that they bring characteristics that can enable the construction and development of a critical conscience by their students. Finally, we propose that emphasis should be given to the awareness process in the initial training of teachers throughout the entire curriculum, which would reflect on criticism of productions and safety in their pedagogical practices.