FORENSIC SCIENCE: AN APPROACH TO HUMAN IDENTIFICATION IN SCIENCE TEACHING

Abstract

This article intend to promote the science teaching using the Forensic Science as model of learning, aiming to establish new pedagogical motivational practices for high school students through basic fingerprinting experiments. In this way, we seek to improve the quality of teaching, especially in relation to practical classes, providing students and teachers of basic education, extracurricular activities and debates using the Forensic Science and the Criminal Investigation. Furthermore, the education through practical science faces many obstacles. In general, the content has low acceptance among students, with, also, an emphasis on abstract concepts that limits student’s curiosity and motivation. Therefore, this research was created in order to develop fingerprint collection, characterization and identification experiments, involving interdisciplinarity and contextualization in a playful way, addressing themes related to human identification. These activities were developed for 37 students in the third (last) year of High School at a private school in the city of Paulista, in Pernambuco. A crime scene simulation was performed, made up of several signs distributed throughout the place, stimulating the integration and dynamics among the students. This enabled the effective participation of students in simulations activities of a criminal expert routine. From the 37 students interviewed, 51% knew the concept of human identification; 81% said they did not know the methods used in the process of human identification; and 95% of students reported not having practical classes often. Thus, the data obtained in the research indicate that students showed interest in the methodology used, as it was the first time that all of them participated in a relation between theory and practice linked to the Forensic Science. That data indicates that the Natural Sciences still faces low acceptance among students, but, in the other hand, practical classes contribute to appreciation, because teaching science is a great challenge. From this perspective, it is believed that this teaching proposal contributes to a better understanding of the contextualization in education. Lastly, it can be stated that a learning with practical activities can be an important didactic to improve the dynamism, because it requires the contextualization, previous knowledge and a daily participations from the students. The potentialities of this theme in the school environment were observed, especially for science teaching and its technologies.