O lugar do ensino de ciências na escolha da carreira universitária de jovens negros

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between school science education and the choice of university career, taking into account the ethnic-racial cohort, and identifying the place of science education in the choice of the career of young people, in view of this cohort. In order to reach the proposed goal, it was necessary to characterize the vision of this research subjects on science education, to know their life projects and their career choices, and to identify the possible relationships between the vision of science teaching and the developments in this choice. Thus, it was decided to use a methodological clipping that would allow the participants to reflect on their school experiences and their possible career choices, and the researcher, the interpretation of the meaning relations. The research was developed with students of the pre-university course of the Federal University of São Carlos, and had as methodological consisted of a questionnaire with multiple-choice question in order to know general data, life project characteristics and career pretensions of the participants; and a focus group, where the discussions initially presented in this paper were shared, in order to verify the hypotheses generated by the group. Based on the data analysis, inspired by the phenomenological method of Merleau Ponty (1989), and based on the participants, units of meaning that relate to career choice were identified. Analyzing these units of meanings, it was noticed that there are two dimensions with which subjects and career are connected: internal dimension that includes the factors that arise from the internal conditions of the individual; and external dimension that refers to the factors that relate to the culture, class and aspects of the individual's social context. Based on these dimensions, four factors were identified that relate to career choice: the aptitude, the teacher, the school subjects and the family. Thus, it was possible to conclude that science education does not have a special place in career choice, it is involved in a larger set of circumstances, from aptitude to social context, involving the affinity that the young person establishes with the teacher himself/herself and his/her qualification the view they have of themselves from the learning verifications developed in the school environment, and the overlap between the contents, the identity of the teacher and the work of the scientist. Such circumstances reflect part of the interaction that individuals make with the world, and thus relate to the creation of the life project of these young people. Therefore, with the results found, it is hoped to highlight the importance that schooling, and especially science education, deal with the life project of young people a more profound and explicit way, leading them to reflect significantly on their positioning regarding their choices, and the distortions demarcated by racial and ethnic dimensions.