Character creation as an inclusion tool: cartographies of a science teaching experience in elementary education

Resumo

The challenge of a special educator to accompany inclusive processes of students with disabilities, in collaboration with a regular classroom teacher, co-exists with the one of testing collective disposals in science teaching and learning contexts. Facing these obstacles, this study seeks to answer the question of how a "problematizing character" can operate as an inclusion mechanism for students with intellectual disabilities and contribute to the integration of a special educator in the pedagogical activities developed in a 5th grade class in a public school. Based on the Invention of Worlds methodology, the regular teacher and the special educator have built strategies of collective disposals with the students and the character. This methodology seeks to create conditions for learning that are guided by an active, creative, and problem-oriented conception, with flexibility to articulate ideas and suggestions brought by the students. The study adopted, methodologically, the cartography of the interactions of the character with the class, especially with three students diagnosed with intellectual disabilities, in a collectively constructed narrative. The results show that the collaborative work between the special educator and the teacher was strengthened by the pedagogical challenge of mobilizing the character and making it a problem solver. The " problematizing character" emerges for the students loaded with inspiration and creative ideas, provoking their involvement and interest in the pedagogical activities. During the interdisciplinary challenges and problems that defied them to think about Science in the interface with imagination and inventiveness proposed in the activities of Invention of Worlds, it was noticed that the feeling of "not knowing" expressed by the students with intellectual disabilities was giving way to the (self) recognition of the unique creative and authorial capacity. The interlocutions that the students established with the character constituted a common plan of interactions and cooperation with the teacher and the special educator, configuring an inclusive collective disposal.