Teaching About Sciences in/for the Global South: Lessons from a Case Study in a Brazilian Classroom
Several studies championed the idea that Science Education should nurture comprehension about Nature of Science (NOS). Although we are aligned with these general demands for science education, in this paper we present an analysis on why and how to address
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Teaching About Sciences in/for the Global South: Lessons from a Case Study in a Brazilian Classroom Cristiano B. Moura, Iamni Torres Jager, and Andreia Guerra
8.1 Introduction (…) it’s very difficult to be creative having been in prison for so long.
On Tuesdays, as usual, at 7:00 a.m., I pass by guards upon entering the school where I work. This school, located in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is a public institution located inside a female prison. This prison unit was built in the 1980s and did not anticipate a school space, therefore one of the cells had to be turned into a school after its construction in order to conform to legislation. For me to arrive in this cell- school, I leave all my personal belongings, in the entrance porch of the penitentiary unit, then I pass through a metal detector and several gates, which are opened by the security agents and locked up again after my passing. On several occasions, during work hours, I forget that I am inside a maximum-security prison. The story of this article begins with the narrative of a teacher entering a classroom located in one of the largest countries in the world in terms of territorial extent, biodiversity and population. This is also one of the countries of greatest social inequality in the world. According to data from the World Inequality Report, coordinated by Thomas Piketty among others,1 30% of Brazilian income is concentrated in the hands of 1% of the country’s inhabitants. This concentration index is charac Piketty, T., Alvaredo, F., Chancel, L., Zucman, G. World Inequality Report (2019, February, 2nd) Retrieved from https://wir2018.wid.world/ 1
C. B. Moura (*) · A. Guerra Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica Celso Suckow da Fonseca (CEFET/RJ), Graduate Program in Science, Technology and Education, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] I. T. Jager Colégio Estadual Primeiro Tenente PM Hailton dos Santos, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 H. A. Yacoubian, L. Hansson (eds.), Nature of Science for Social Justice, Science: Philosophy, History and Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47260-3_8
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terized by the greatest kind of concentration in the world. Considering wages as an indicator of poverty, we realize that poverty in Brazil is not distributed equally among the different gender and ethnic groups, even between the people with the same academic qualifications: 42% of the workers are female and 33% are male, and in the range of 10 minimum wages, 3% of the workers are men and 1.5% are women. In the case of the dissimilarity between blacks and whites, the inequality is not different. In the range between 1 and 1.5 times the national minimum wage, 40% of workers are black and 31% white, but in the range of more than 10 minimum wages, 1% are black and 4% are white. Brazilian taxation reflects the country’s economic inequality as well. Reports on Brazil’s socioeconomic profile, such as that made by Oxfam,2 show
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