A “Grande história” como busca da articulação de conhecimentos na formação docente

Abstract

Mechanistic thinking, the basis of Modern Science, compartmentalizes knowledge. However, science itself in the 20th century revealed limits in the fragmented way of understanding reality. Edgar Morin criticizes this thought and postulates that knowledge must be seen in an integrated way in a web of relationships, according to the paradigm of complexity. Based on this, a course of training education for teachers in the distance modality was proposed, which had as its guiding principle the "Big History", which brings the narrative from the Big Bang to the present day. In it, the themes are articulated around the growing levels of energy demand, giving relevance to the knowledge covered. The present study aimed to identify which strengths and limitations are pointed out by teachers when working with “Big History” in their teaching activities, so that it is an articulating axis for both fields of knowledge and professional practices. About 400 teachers participated in the course and the results showed that they establish relationships between different themes, even in a scenario of fragmentation of knowledge, even though, for the most part, they are linear relationships with few unfoldings. They recognize that training courses prepare teachers in a fragmented way, suggesting ways to change this scenario. They still go through ways of organizing knowledge into disciplines, which reflects our difficulty in thinking in a systemic way or differently from what we were trained to do. As for “Big History”, they recognize that it is a proposal that gives relevance and works in a transdisciplinary way, highlighting the approach to the theme “energy”, as a uniting area. However, they reveal difficulties in translating the subjects dealt with into pedagogical practices, criticizing the way schools are structured and complaining about their own training, in which they had highly specialized and poorly articulated contents.