A construção de uma casa como tema para discussões sobre ética em uma aula de ciências

Abstract

Inspired by the traditions of research involving Science, Technology, Society and Environment (CTSA), this work investigated whether a sequence of activities aimed at decision-making helps in the manifestation and problematization of students' views of ethics, especially ethical selfishness. For this, we carried out studies on ethics and, using the Problem-Based Learning (PBL) teaching strategy, we planned four activities that had participants choose materials for building a house. The activities were developed remotely with Freshmen of the Full Licentiate Degree in Physics at the Federal University of Lavras (UFLA) in the curricular component Integrated Project I: Interdisciplinarity. We collected data through written productions, recording of synchronous meetings and interviews carried out between activities. As a form of analysis, we grouped keywords that indicated the moral consideration present in the writings and analyzed the recordings of the debates that took place in the synchronous meetings and interviews, with the purpose of classifying the ethical tendencies of the students, using as categories some normative ethical theories, such as utilitarianism, Kantian ethics and ethics of virtues, as well as moral ontologies: individualism, anthropocentrism, selective anthropocentrism and biocentrism. We observed in the class a predominance of positions close to anthropocentrism, with fewer cases of selfishness and individualism, in the first activity. As the synchronous meetings took place, these trends turned predominantly towards ecocentrism and socioecocentrism at the end of the four activities. In this way, we consider that the sequence of activities and their development proved to be promising to promote the problematization of ethical issues and views with students. In addition, the data indicate possible educational potential of the activities by stimulating empathy and reflections on public policies, ethics, working conditions and sustainability. Finally, we emphasize the problematizing character of prejudices in the sequence of proposed activities, since in addition to bringing this debate to the fore, it provided the overcoming of the author's own prejudices.