IN/EXCLUSION IN THE TEACHING-LEARNING PROCESS OF NATURAL SCIENCES FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF BLIND STUDENTS AND TEACHERS OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN RONDÔNIA
Keywords: Teaching Science and Biology; blind students; School in/exclusion.
The process of school inclusion of students with disabilities has gained greater contours in the last three decades, however, the task of effectively including it has been a great challenge for teachers and contemporary society. Considering the increase in students with disabilities, enrolled in common teaching classes, which, according to the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research (INEP), exceeded two million enrollments in 2021, it is necessary to develop strategies to ensure full access to scientific knowledge for this target audience. Based on this context and, in general terms, the present study aimed to investigate, through narratives, the process of school inclusion and teaching-learning of Natural Sciences, experienced by three blind students and three teachers, two from Sciences and one from Sciences. Biology, in three basic education schools in the countryside of Rondônia, two state schools and one in the federal education network. To this end, a qualitative approach was established, of the oral history type in its thematic aspect (Meihy and Holanda, 2019), whose collection instrument was a semi-structured script that guided the interviews, which were transcribed, textualized, checked and validated by the participants, constituting the research data corpus. To analyze it, we used the Discursive Textual Analysis (DTA) proposed by Moraes and Galiazzi (2006; 2016), from which the following categories emerged: personal and school trajectory; teaching-learning strategies; curriculum adaptations; perceptions about remote teaching and teaching performance. The results showed that inclusion has not been implemented in the schools surveyed, as there is a lack of accessibility to blind students, both in architectural, curricular and technological terms. Insecurity and insufficiency in the initial and continuing training of teachers to work with blind students were also observed; absence of Science textbooks in Braille; as well as other resources appropriate to the needs of students who are blind in/excluded. However, efforts were noted on the part of teachers to improvise teaching strategies in Science classes, in order to allow blind students the right to learn together with other people.