Letters to Mrs. Suzana: a trip from São Paulo to Salvador in the training of scientific educators with Paulo Freire

Abstract

This paper aims to present the report of a didactic activity developed with undergraduate students in Biological Sciences and Pedagogy during 2021 and to analyze the potential of using a documentary for the initial training of science educators. This activity was carried out online in the context of emergency remote teaching and was inspired by the principles of Thematic Research and the Freirean Thematic Approach to raise awareness of the existence of Significant Thematic Universes (STU). The series “Street Food Latin America” was used as a resource to simulate a reality case. As a final product of the activity, and material for the analysis of this report, letters to Dona Suzana, protagonist of the documentary, were produced by the graduates where they were able, in an exercise of dialogicity, to mobilize some aspects of Paulo Freire's problematizing pedagogy from relations significant themes that emerged from the group discussions. As Freire indicates, we chose a “way of walking” for this exercise given the limitations imposed by the pandemic. We note that, in addition to the perception of a STU, there is an incorporation of elements present in Paulo Freire's categories in the composition of the letters, and the problematization, dialogicity, cultural synthesis and praxis were striking elements.