Sentidos de contextualização nas questões de ciências da natureza e suas tecnologias no ENEM: uma análise discursiva

Abstract

This study aims to characterize how contextualization is built in the National High School Exam’s questions about natural sciences. When applied at first in 1998, the examination, on a voluntary basis, had as main goal enabling participants a reference to self-assessment. In 2009, the exam underwent profound changes and new goals were added, like taking part of the Unified Selection System and certifying at the high school level. These changes have led to a change in the organization and presentation of questions, and the exam now has four tests that bring together related subject matter. Since its creation, the construction of its questions aims to comply with curriculum guidelines that reinforce concepts of skills and abilities, problem situation, interdisciplinarity and contextualization. We started from three premises in this work: the text that references the exam allows different possible interpretations of the concept of contextualization; contextualization in education is a process of establishing a relationship between a certain knowledge and one (or more) context(s); and contextualization is present in all exam’s questions. We identified different discourses about this concept that circulate in the literature of science education, which we grouped into three axes: daily life, scientific knowledge and pedagogical knowledge. In our research, we focused on the analysis of relations between scientific knowledge approached in the text and social and scientific contexts in curricular treatment of a socially acute question, consumerism - elected as our thematic focus. This theme has been defined together with basic education teachers who participate in collaborative groups focused on curricular inclusion of these questions in high school. The corpus of our research was composed by 14 questions of all exam’s editions from 2009 onwards. Inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis as a theoretical and methodological framework, we characterized how social events are represented on the questions in terms of their social actors, processes and circumstances. So, we underlined how discursive choices present in the formulations of the questions represent discourses about contextualization that circulate in science education. The analyzes indicate that the discourses about contextualization that refer to everyday life axis are represented mainly by the presence of decision-making situations, which are often based on scientific knowledge. The discourse about contextualization referring to scientific knowledge axis refers mainly to the relationship between science, technology and society. We identified that one favors a direct relationship between the production of scientific knowledge, technological production and social welfare. The discourses about contextualization referring to pedagogical knowledge axis are represented on mainly by the presence of pedagogical strategies such as construction of hypothetical situations for educational purposes; phenomena explanation without assuming prior knowledge; and preparation of questions about previously read texts.