Self-organization in the learning of scientific concept in space orga-nized from the perspective of the History of Science

Abstract

We defined and conducted pedagogical interviews with Elementary II school-age children (6th to 9th grades) of public schools from the city of São Paulo who had just visited a scientific exhibition where they were exposed to the classical theories of physics. We analyzed, through video recording, the dynamics of the (student-student, student-group, student-interviewer, student-exhibition) interactions developed during the interview, in terms of language expressions and correlations established in the direction of scientific configurations of meaning. We name as potential dialogical, the interactions in which there is regulation of students' posture in the direction of learning, and effective dialogical the interactions in which correlations that lead, through the permanence of meaning, to learning configurations are developed. This distinction arose in the analysis of two situations that revealed regulatory processes in the interaction, but not with similar results: in the first one, a learning situation emerged while in the other one no scientific organization of meaning was obtained. The data are analyzed in terms of processes of self-organization of dynamic systems applied to learning. The effective dialogic interaction where the learning configuration of the scientific concept of energy was developed took place in a scientific exhibition space organized with cognitive coherence where the historical perspective of the construction of the scientific concepts was considered. We conclude that this type of interview can be an efficient tool for proposals and evaluation of methodologies, in the classroom and in scientific exhibitions, aimed at conceptual learning.