O lúdico no ensino de Ciências Naturais: a sua compreensão e aplicabilidade sob o olhar dos professores pedagogos

Abstract

This thesis focuses on understanding the role of playfulness in Science teaching in the Early Years, based on the articulation between conceptual foundations, teachers’ understanding, and pedagogical practice. It begins with the differentiation between playful, playfulness, and playful activity, understood as interdependent yet distinct dimensions. The playful refers to resources historically produced by human expression. Playfulness, in turn, refers to the subject’s subjective and affective experience when engaging in an activity involving a playful resource. A playful activity materializes when the subject, in contact with the playful resource, experiences playfulness. However, in both initial and continuing training of Pedagogues and its relation to Science teaching, the development of playful teaching in the Early Years remains deficient. In initial training, Pedagogy programs offer limited course hours for Science, curricular fragmentation, marginalization of the area in comparison to Portuguese and Mathematics, lack of interdisciplinarity among specific subjects, among other issues. These factors compromise the preparation of future teachers to integrate interactive and innovative practices. Continuing education, although provided for in public policies, still appears superficial, disconnected from school reality, and lacking continuity, which limits the re-signification of work with playfulness. It becomes urgent to promote permanent formative processes that are reflective, collaborative, and interdisciplinary, capable of recognizing teaching knowledge and expanding possibilities for the critical use of playfulness in Science teaching, both conceptually and in practice. Thus, this thesis — of bibliographic, documentary, state-of-knowledge, and field-based nature — was grounded in a qualitative approach. Regarding the state of-knowledge results, only 51 dissertations and 1 thesis from 2000 to 2024 were identified addressing playfulness and Science teaching in the Early Years, most of them reducing the concept of playful resources to games and play, and showing scarce theoretical grounding in the field of Science education. This reveals theoretical fragility and confirms the relevance of this study. In the analysis of interviews conducted with 16 teachers from the oldest schools in each region of the municipality of Cascavel– PR, a semi-structured interview was applied, and data were analyzed using Bardin’s (2016) Content Analysis methodology. Results showed that most teachers associate the playful dimension with games and play, as well as with elements that represent playfulness. Furthermore, they did not present conceptual clarity regarding the terms playfulness and playful activity. Despite this limitation, teachers acknowledge the benefits of using playful elements in Science classes. Some, however, restrict the use of playfulness only to the first years of Primary Education, contradicting the BNCC and reducing its formative potential throughout all years. The results also point to the need to rethink the curricular organization of Pedagogy programs, strengthen continuing education, and overcome reductionist views, so as to integrate playful work as an essential pedagogical principle in children’s scientific ed