Challenges of teaching biological in a Graduation in Rural Education

Abstract

I am a teacher in the Graduation in Rural Education, a graduation course which objective is to graduate teachers to teach in rural schools. I teach subjects related to biology and biology theaching. The natural sciences learning is historically neutral, acritic, and distant of student’s reality, linked to a capitalist logic.  The positivistic and traditional education is debated among the years and an opposite way to teach is developed in the rural schools. Nowadays, the emancipatory education arrives into the university in the form of Graduation in Rural Education (GRE), representing a challenge to the teachers once they come from a graduation based on capitalism, positivism and knowledge fragmentation. Thus, to teach in a GRE requires to surpass issues that begins in the problematization of education conception, and finish in developing a libertarian teach practice. Accordingly, this paper presents an experience which shows the course of a teacher in surpassing some issues, during the period that she taugth a discipline named “Introduction to cell biology”. This discipline is taught since 2017, and in the end is performed, with the students, an evaluation of the discipline to upgrade it continuously. The upgrade process was marked by the teacher’s rupture with traditional and positivistic teaching strategies, allowing the students change of perception about the importance and the link of the discipline to they’re realities. Considering that we are unfinished living beings, this teach experience is still in progress.