Proposta Pedagógica para o Ensino Explícito de Argumentação: O Caso da Controvérsia Histórica do Gás Oxigênio

Pedagogical Proposal for Explicit Teaching of Argumentation: The Case of the Historical Controversy of Oxygen Gas. We highlight the potential of a pedagogical proposal for the explicit teaching of argumentation based on the use of the historical oxygen gas controversy from the analysis of the quality of the arguments of pre-service chemistry teachers. A teaching sequence was elaborated and the pre-service teachers had to read historical texts in order to ground the arguments for the debate about the questioning: If a retrograde Nobel Prize in Chemistry were to be awarded to an 18th-century scientist involved in the discovery of oxygen gas, which scientist(s) would be granted? The individual arguments and argumentative texts of the groups were analyzed based on the following criteria: claim, evidence and justification and the relation of the argument with the vision of discovery in science. From the analysis, we observed that the pre-service teachers were concerned not only to present evidence to the scientists they defended, but also to those they opposed. Pre-service teachers tried to persuade by proposing a line of reasoning that showed the fundamentals that guided their choices. We found that the vision of discovery in science influenced decision-making, demonstrating the relationship between epistemic criteria and argumentation.