O ensino de ciências no contexto da contrarreforma do ensino médio: significações atribuídas por professores em uma escola no Alto Solimões

Abstract

This study investigates the meanings produced by Science teachers regarding their teaching practice within the context of contemporary educational policies. Its central objective is to understand the significations constructed by teachers of Natural Sciences and Their Technologies in the context of the upper secondary education counter-reform in a public school of the state education system, located in the Alto Solimões region, in a city in the interior of the state of Amazonas, Brazil. Grounded in historical-dialectical materialism, the research is based on the understanding of the school as a historical and contradictory totality, embedded in class struggles and conflicts surrounding antagonistic societal projects. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews and conversation circles as instruments for data production, which were analyzed in light of the Method of Signification Nuclei. A total of nine teachers participated in the research, in compliance with ethical principles of scientific research. This procedure made it possible to apprehend the movement of teachers’ consciousness in its articulation with the objective, institutional, and subjective conditions of teaching work, overcoming fragmented and individualizing analyses. In this context, five distinct signification nuclei were identified, articulated into two structuring axes, which were organized into an interpretative synthesis. The analysis revealed that teachers experience a process of curricular fragmentation, loss of pedagogical autonomy, and intensification of control over teaching work, producing feelings of frustration, powerlessness, and professional devaluation. These elements configure a scenario of alienation, in which teaching tends to be reduced to the technical execution of prescribed curricula. However, the results also reveal movements of resistance and reconfiguration of practice, expressed through pedagogical creativity, mutual support among peers, and the construction of collective spaces for dialogue and reflection. The Signification Nuclei indicate that affectivity plays a central role in the constitution of teachers’ consciousness, acting as a mediation between ethical-political suffering and the critical elaboration of experience. When mediated collectively, emotions are transformed into engagement and strengthen the understanding of the political dimension of teaching work. In this movement, a transition is observed from a practical consciousness limited to immediate demands to an expanded consciousness capable of recognizing teaching as a social and historical practice. Thus, it is argued that, although deeply strained by the determinations of the neoliberal context, teaching work is not reduced to passive adaptation. On the contrary, the apprehended totality reveals the reconfiguration of teaching identity in the tension between alienation and resistance, reaffirming the school as a space of dispute and of production of new historical meanings with emancipatory potential.