Explorando a ciência envolvida na alimentação saudável: um estudo em ambiente não-formal de educação

Abstract

In this work we report a project, carried out with children/adolescents assisted by a Centro de Convivência of Campo Mourão - PR, which sought to explore the Science involved in healthy eating. The Centro de Convivência was characterized in our work as a non-formal educational space, it is an environment maintained by the Secretaria de Ação Social of Campo Mourão prefecture, which serves children from 6 to 14 years of age in situations of social vulnerability. Five meetings of about two hours each were organized, based on the nine events suggested by Robert Gagné's theory of instruction. For each of the instructional events we seek to use different approaches and resources, such as ludic activities, demonstrative experimental activities, educational games and the use of cartoons. We consider that the use of the nine principles of Gagné's theory of instruction, as the organizer of the meetings, was extremely important to succeed in the teaching and learning process about healthy eating, whose emphasis was given to the science involved in this topic. We observed that the use of differentiated activities/approaches favored the participation of the childrens/adolescents during the meetings, in which they shared their eating experiences and how, after each meeting, they took this knowledge to the other members of the family. The learning of the contents worked was observed in several moments, in different meetings, mainly when we compared the answers of the questionnaire "We want to know you!" with the speeches of the childrens/adolescents in the last two meetings. At the end of our analysis, we verified that the work accomplished contributed to some of the objectives indicated by the Secretaria de Ação Social to be achieved during the year when working with childrens/adolescents. For the purpose of "developing affective and sociability relationships", for example, we verified that the use of educational games contributed to improve the relation between childrens/adolescents, since they had to solve problems in a cooperative way, with the participation of all the members of the team. The same type of contribution was realized during the making of posters about healthy foods, and foods that can be harmful to health. For the purpose of "Contributing to the insertion, reinsertion and permanence of the child and the adolescent in the educational system" we observed that during all the meetings the childrens/adolescents realized that systematized knowledge is necessary to understand the world around us and that access to this knowledge is largely obtained in school.