Romance e o ensino de biologia: uma análise da formação de conceitos na área de ecologia

Abstract

In the context of tensions between the expansion of scientific knowledge and the circulation of anti-scientific discourses, this study examines how the reading of a novel is articulated with the mobilization of Ecology concepts in high school students’ written productions, taking Sci entific Literacy (SL) as a theoretical and analytical framework. Recognizing the limitations of school practices centered on content transmission and of a scientific language that may restrict access to concepts, the study proposes the incorporation of literature, specifically the novel, as a mediating language in the articulation between knowledge and reflection.This qualitative study was conducted with second-year high school students from a public state school in Mi nas Gerais, Brazil, and was organized into five stages: initial written production to elicit prior conceptions, guided reading of the literary work, post-reading written production, collective discussions and systematizations, and final written production. Data analysis, grounded in Content Analysis (Bardin, 2016) and articulated with lexical analysis supported by the IRaMuTeQ software, focused on identifying conceptual shifts and modes of SL mobilization. The theoretical framework draws on studies of SL as a language practice, science as a social and discursive practice, and reading as a meaning-making practice, in dialogue with Osborne (2023), Sasseron and Carvalho (2008, 2011), Piassi (2007, 2013), and Gomes (2011). The results indicate shifts in how concepts are mobilized by students, with a predominant movement from naming and descriptive forms to utterances that establish relations, conditions, and consequences, although not uniformly across participants. A higher incidence of explanation and organization of information is observed in later stages, while more general and weakly articulated formulations persist in part of the corpus. These movements do not constitute linear progression, but rather partial reconfigurations in the use of concepts. Within this context, literary reading and writing activities operate as conditions for the production of utterances, through which different modes of conceptual elaboration become visible. As an educational product, a didactic guide for science teachers was developed, presenting proposals that articulate literary reading and Biology teaching. The analyzed data allow for discussing possible articulations between literary reading and Biology teaching, based on the modes of conceptual mobilization observed in the corpus.