O discurso de professores de ciências relativo ao uso da robótica educacional na cidade do Recife

Abstract

Educational robotics as a methodological resource in science teaching, has been recognized in specialized literature as a strategy to increase investigative thinking in students, considering the growing digitalization of society, a hallmark of the 21th century. Authors like Ramírez and Sosa (2013) and Chavarría and Saldaño (2010) point the 1980s as years that the first works regarding robots in classrooms were published. Nowadays, it is discussed its curricular insertion, as well as teachers' training for its didactic use, privileging planning and research skills and search for solutions materialized by the concepts involved in programming and project building. Moreover, the State of Pernambuco, particularly the Recife City Prefecture, have been allocating significant investments in the use of robotics in schools. Still, the continued training offered by these networks to their teachers have been shown to be short of what is necessary for the pedagogical use of robotics, especially in natural science disciplines. In this context and guided by the hypothesis that the teachers' discourse is a practice that supports their daily work, therefore being a source for comprehending the process of insertion of robotics as a curricular component in schools, we performed a qualitative and exploratory research through Discourse Analysis (DA) to understand how teachers signify robotics in science teaching, to investigate the meanings that teachers attribute to robotics and to identify the origin and affiliation of these discourses. For this analysis, we were based in the works of Pêcheux and Orlandi on French line of Discourse Analysis as a practice of linguistic analysis in the field of Communication. Our methodological framework consisted of two steps: individual reflexive interview and a interview group of four teachers that have been using robotics in their pedagogical practice. With the gathered data, we correlated the Discourse Analysis categories with emphasis on paraphrases, polysemy, forgetfulness and discursive formations. As results, we perceived affiliation to two discourses: the institutional and the pedagogical. Through directed analysis it was possible to comprehend existing limitations in continued formations offered by the Education Secretariat, as well as infra-structural difficulties listed by the teachers for the use of robotics. In conclusion, we understand that the research met our expectations, fulfilling the proposed objectives and answering the research question from which derives our thesis, that argues that the discourse of science teachers about the pedagogical use of robotics originates in part in official discourses (governmental and institutional) and from constructionism paradigms (pedagogical discourse).