Juliano Camillo

Juliano Camillo

I’ve been working with the Socio-Cultural-Historical approach since 2009, when I started my master’s work, which central subject was the subject-object relation in the experimental activities in science education, in special, the possibilities of sharing the same object in the activity and conditions of making sense through the experimentation.

So, the question I have been making to myself in the last three years is: Why do I (or we) need a socio-cultural-historical approach?

Of course this question can have a pragmatic and very simple answer of that some problems can be resolved within this perspective. Actually for me this is not a good answer or the answer that makes me glad, neither the answer I am trying to construct in order to give sense to my research.

By doing the choice for a socio-cultural-historical approach, I am also doing a choice for a specific (and complex) view about human being, about world, about education, about knowledge. More than this, I am doing the choice for a specific and complex view in which all this things cannot be thought separately. And I did this choice.

So, now I am in the land where human being is more than a biological organism trying to adapt itself to environment, and the human mind is more than an intrapersonal structure that aims to give support to this adaptation. I am in the land where is possible to think about reason and emotions, knowledge and real life, where is possible to transform the reality.

In my PHD course, started in the middle of this year, I will try to analyze the relation between Activity Theory and Freirean Educational Perspective and implications of this relation for Science Education.

Many concepts related to socio-cultural-historical approach have been appropriated by researchers in Science Education field, but superficially, which lead them to make some incomplete or even inconsistent uses of this set of ideas. So, my interest in this course is related to study in more depth some theoretical and methodological aspects of this perspective, especially, its foundations, in order to better understanding the complex processes in Science Education. And, in this way, to contribute to transform the current practices that have been leading to alienation and dehumanization.

Presentation “Between existential and the political – a look into the construction of individuaity and the humankind in science education”
Download presentation of the speech (EXE, 5.30MB)