A diagnosis of the initial training of teachers in the area of natural sciences from the perspective of teaching astronomy

This article seeks to present a current diagnosis on how Astronomy Teaching is situated in the context of Science Education in Brazil, and in teacher training. For High School, the National Common Curricular Base (NCCB) provides for interdisciplinary teaching in Natural Sciences and its Technologies, but currently the initial training of Physics, Chemistry and Biology teachers takes place in a disciplinary manner. In this context, we tried to identify whether subjects inherent to Astronomy are included in the curricula of these professionals’ training courses, to project the percentage of licensed professors in 2020 who could have access to these disciplines. As a way of structuring our work, we investigated the places and Higher Education Institutions where this contingent was formed, through the quantitative analysis of microdata from INEP and data captured on the websites of the degrees. The text is permeated by discussions and reflections regarding teacher training, in dialogue with the literature in the area. The results point to a contradictory scenario, where the degrees in Physics offered the best access to subjects related to Astronomy but formed a small number of professors. On the other hand, the degrees in Chemistry and, mainly, Biology had high rates of teacher training, but the access of their graduates to Astronomy subjects was insignificant, which, unfortunately, does little to improve the scenario of Astronomy Teaching in Brazil.

Keywords:
Teaching Astronomy; teacher training; curriculum; NCCB