Educação para resiliência em risco e desastre socioambiental: potencialidades da educação CTSA na formação científica de estudantes dos anos iniciais

Abstract

The contemporary Brazilian context, marked by the intensification of extreme climate events, highlights the urgent need to discuss, within the educational sphere, socioscientific issues related to environmental crises. In a society strongly permeated by science and technology, such discussions become fundamental for understanding socio-environmental risks and disasters and for constructing strategies of coping and adaptation, especially from the early years of schooling. In this sense, this research considers socio-environmental risks and disasters associated with extreme climate events as socioscientific issues (SSI), understood as phenomena that articulate scientific, social, technological, environmental, and ethical dimensions. The study seeks to answer the following research question: How can a pedagogical proposal grounded in STSE Education contribute to the understanding of socio-environmental risks and disasters and to the development of elements of resilience among students in the early years of Elementary Education?? The general objective of the research is to explore the potential of STSE Education to promote resilience in contexts of socio-environmental risk and disaster among students in the early years of Elementary School, through the development and analysis of a pedagogical workshop. The research, qualitative in nature and interpretative in character, involved seven face-to-face meetings held between February and April 2025, with the participation of 35 fourth-grade Elementary School students, in a school within the Municipal Education Network of Curitiba, Paraná, Brazil. The pedagogical workshop was conceived as a didactic-methodological strategy for education addressing socio-environmental risk and disaster as SSI from the perspective of STSE Education, involving analysis activities, investigative practices, logbook records, and moments of collective debate, with the aim of constructing scientific meanings, developing scientific talk, and promoting resilient attitudes. Various teaching resources were used, such as videos, poems, digital applications, music, news reports, and scientific texts. Data were produced through audio and video recordings of the activities and the students’ written records and were analyzed in light of the Social Semiotics proposed by Jay Lemke. The results indicate that interactions and collaborative practices fostered the understanding of the interrelationships among Science, Technology, Society, and Environment, expanded students’ engagement with scientific practice, and enabled connections with the concept of risk society and with the contemporary challenges of the climate crisis. As an outcome of the research, an educational product was developed in the form of a pedagogical guide entitled “What if we could hear nature, what would it tell us?”, which brings together proposals and strategies to support teachers in addressing resilience in contexts of socio-environmental risk and disaster in the early years of Elementary School.