A argumentação como princípio constitutivo do processo pedagógico: uma investigação-ação acerca das elaborações conceituais de crianças de anos iniciais do ensino fundamental

Abstract

In Brazil, the studies referring to argumentation are located in areas such as Philosophy, Linguistics, Psychology and in the legal area, opposing to the notion that it should be restricted to Rhetoric, Logic or Dialectics. A significant amount of research in the field of Psychology is dedicated to understanding the processes of acquisition, functioning and mediation of argumentation in the construction of knowledge. This work aims to answer missing aspects in this field of research by placing it on the field of educational research, investigating the movement of argumentation in the didactic system under three perspectives: as an epistemological principle, curriculum content and didactic agent. The guiding questions that support the thesis are: Considering the tessiture of the didactic system of which the teacher, the student and knowledge are part, what dimensions does the argumentation take in the pedagogical process, whose intentionality is the development of concepts? Taking a qualitative approach, the research is guided by the principles of action research and, with regard to analytical procedures, by the principles of exploratory and micro genetic analysis. The fieldwork, of longitudinal nature, was done in a school of the municipal education system of Estação/RS, together with a class of children, from their entry into the 3rd year of elementary education until the conclusion of the 5th year. Each year, a didactic sequence was carried out, having as its axis the study of the letter of complaint (3rd year), the debate (4th year) and the opinion article (5th year). The data includes video recordings, photographs, records produced by the children and the logbook. The research is based on the Cultural-Historical Theory (VIGOTSKI, 1995, 2009, 2007, 2014, 2018; LURIA, 1979, 1990, 2001) and the works developed by Leitão (2006, 2007, 2011, 2013), Rodrigues (2006) and Pontecorvo et al (2005). From these studies, the following premises emerge: The concepts are structured and generalized through instruction and experience, affective-cognitive unity and the act of thinking involved by the production of meaning; argumentation is a discursive activity that includes linguistic and sociocognitive processes relevant to the development of activities at the metacognitive level and the acquisition of new strategies and more complex knowledge; the defense of a point of view requires a process of "negotiation", in which conceptions about the world are developed, revised and transformed, which gives to argumentation an epistemic dimension. Based on this and the analysis of the material produced, argumentation is proposed as a constitutive principle in the pedagogical process and an essential element for the agency of the processes of instruction, self-instruction and, specifically, for the conceptual learning of students. This thesis derives from the presence of argumentation in the didactic system, which acts in the dimensions of content, epistemic principle and didactic agent. The results indicate that this presence brings the students to the dialogue, encouraging them to use intellectual instruments, such as comparison, deduction, exemplification, categorization and counterposition, proper to the argumentative logic, for the self-regulation of their own cognitive activity and of their colleagues (heteroregulation), setting in motion metacognition and meta-conceptualization activities and placing them in a process of distributed cognition (DANIELS, 2011; HOLLAN, 2000). Thus, the occurrence of development possibilities and acquirements that foster the continuity of the learning beyond the classroom, in an arbitrary and autonomous manner, is stimulated.