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This work aims to understand the path of environmental education (Sauvé, 2005) that is mobilized in the environmental education policies of Brazil and Colombia, as well as the disputes that took place for its elaboration. We analyze institutional documents, for Brazil Law 9,975 of 1999, decree 4281 of 2002 and the National Program of EA (ProNEA 2003, 2005, 2014); and for Colombia the general guidelines for an environmental education policy (1995), and law 1549 of 2012 that consolidates the environmental education policy (2002). Present a history of the construction of these programs, and an analysis of the concept of Environmental Education present in their discourse. We highlight the predominance of critical perspective in Brazil and a Systemic one in the case of Colombia, in addition to the presence of other currents of the area as a political strategy and negotiation with other political and ideological sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a contemporary demand on STEM education to support learning experiences in which students use scientific thinking to solve tasks. Scientific thinking involves domain-specific knowledge and general domain strategies of thinking. The object of interest in this research was the set of students' experiences of scientific thinking in which they articulate domain-general strategies and domain-specific knowledge to solve physics tasks. Our goal was to characterize the experiences of scientific thinking of two groups of four students engaged in tasks about Newtonian Mechanics. The volunteers were 19 students, 15-17 years old, enrolled in electronics or computer science courses (11th grade) of a Brazilian vocational high school at Belo Horizonte/Minas Gerais. All class activities proposed to the students have been regularly used since 2010, therefore, we made no special intervention to conduct the study. Data collection occurred during the classes and involved audio and video recordings of students working in group; field notes; and photographs of students' notebooks and of the posters they made to conduct oral presentations. The choice of the groups was based on how assiduous the members were. We have transcribed episodes in which we identified experiences of scientific thinking. These transcriptions, the field notes and the photographs were analyzed together, in interaction with each other. Data analysis is based upon John Dewey's Theory of Experience. Our results show that the experiences of scientific thinking of the two groups were educative experiences, although qualitatively different. This difference was due to the way students interacted with the conditions given to solve the tasks. Additional information is given about the school circumstances in which the study was conducted to allow a better evaluation of results quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Science Education, notably in Physics Teaching, there are research based instructional strategies that are renown by their potential to promote conceptual development. It is likely that many of these strategies lead to more elaborate learning; promoting, for instance, scientific thinking development. Scientific thinking might be construed as the sum of domain-specific knowledge and domain-general strategies. Here is reported an investigation of domain-general strategies used by students on tasks proposed in a Newtonian Dynamics activity inspired by "Tutorials in Introductory Physics". Nineteen volunteers, aged 15-17, participated; all were students in electronics or computer science from a Brazilian vocational high school. The school activities proposed to the students have been regularly used in the Physics course for seven years. Therefore, there was no special interventions prepared with research purposes. Data collection involved audio and video recordings of students' teamwork; field notes; and photographs of student's notebooks and of posters teams presented in classes. Data analysis was based on categorization of domain-general strategies used by students. We found that students used four domain-general strategies on the proposed tasks: evidence-based reasoning, assessment of the reasoning line, reason based on operational definition and hypotheticdeductive reasoning. These findings suggest that activities inspired by the "Tutorials in Introductory Physics" favor the learning of scientific concepts plus further - and yet more elaborate - learning. These results place a demand on the field of Science Education to refine the strategies of data collection and data analysis as a way to identify the use of other domain-general strategies by students in similar contexts, as well as the expansion of research to other schools contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the relations among different forms of masculinity by researching interactions among young people as they carry out open-ended school tasks. The methodology was of an ethnographic type: Observations were made for one year in the physics classes of a first-year group in a Brazilian secondary school. A microanalysis was made of a teaching sequence in which students are challenged to find alternatives to the hegemonic model of science and masculinity. Four classes were presented in detail, widi audio and video recordings. The different profiles of masculinity interacted, creating patterns of resistance, relations of power and collaboration that directly influenced the development of the group and its individuals. There are indications that proposed activities and tasks can regulate tensions, especially when they allow individuals to experience the same opportunities for growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]