O ensino de ciências e suas relações com a pós-verdade na política brasileira durante a pandemia da covid-19

Abstract

One of the major challenges in teaching science in the past decade lies in the fact that objective truth, that factual truth, has transformed into a "narrative." In other words, this truth no longer belongs to a group of people specialized in the subject; it is now individual and strongly linked to the personal beliefs and ideologies of each individual, in a so-called "Post-Truth Era" (KEYES, 2004). This work sought to understand how post-truth discourses have affected and are connected to science education, and what role science education plays in a radical political context with extremist biases, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. We categorized the phenomenon of post- truth into a larger set, with its subsets, such as: misinformation, denialism, infodemic, disinformation, and fake news. Over 4 chapters, we aimed to broaden and bring a new perspective to the concept of post-truth. With the help of the Iramuteq software, we were able to analyze more deeply the denialist speeches of state authorities who governed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Using excerpts from the final text of the Covid-19 Parliamentary Inquiry Committee (CPI), we generated graphs in the software that divided the speeches into classes and groups, helping us to better understand the dynamics of post-truth speeches and the reasons for so much misinformation. Alongside a bibliographic review of articles from renowned education research journals, we selected abstracts from 24 articles from 5 Education and Research Journals in Education. With this, we were able to compare post-truth discourses and the speeches of researchers in the field. In the end, a correlation was made between these two analyses and science education, and how it can be further explored to avoid further waves of science denial and skepticism. These analyses indicated that post- truth discourses are strongly linked to groups profiting from social media engagements, seeking power and political influence beyond money. We also observed that science education has never focused on political education; although it analyzes nature, this education does not link nature and politics, and we understand that the two are interconnected. It was from this lack of connection that discourses denying and discrediting science were able to spread. With a language well-suited to social media, with false and biased news that do not require reflective depth, let alone complex explanations, post-truth gained ground, precisely in a context of a global pandemic, causing deaths and suffering beyond imagination.