Scientific Initiation： Meanings and Peculiarities of Public Policy in Brazil

This paper aims to analyze the Scientific Initiation （SI） as public policy of higher education in Brazil, from meanings and peculiarities of this device in the undergraduate academic＇s formation, created jointly with the National Research Council in 1951 currently National Council for Scientific and Technological Development （CNPq）. This corporation emerged from the recognition of the strategic importance of science and necessity of institutionalization of encouragement and fostering research. This is a theoretical bibliographical study and documentary that evidences the contributions and limits of SI while political science training should be part of academic activities to provide the development and support of investigative spirit. The concept of SI was established in universities as an activity to be developed in order to encourage the student to become familiar with scientific practices. The study concluded that SI is based on institutionalized norms within higher education to foster the development of science, and it is considered as an important strategy of expansion of graduate studies in Brazil.

Subjectivity Versus Objectivity in Teaching Foreign Language

In this paper we propose to discuss the issue of subjectivity versus objectivity teaching practice of foreign language, especially English, in Brazil. Starting from the short story ＂The Parrot and Descartes＂ by Pauline Melville, we argue that Cartesianism has influenced a view on education which tends to consider good and valuable what is ＂scientific＂, ＂objective＂ and ＂universal＂. The subjective and the local seem to be considered undesirable and unreliable. Brazilian scholars on the education field, such as Coracini and Souza are important support for our argument.

Educating for Citizenship： A Case Study of Brazilians of Japanese Descendent in Public Schools in Japan

The current work presents a support tutoring program on the Japanese language applied to 12 newly arrived Brazilian students who moved to Japan after their parents migrated in order to work in electronic factories. All of them were not able to speak Japanese, even the greetings; during lunch time they also had to eat some types of food they had never had before. Certainly, it was a daily battle against the unknown as they interfaced between two very different cultures. This support tutoring program was implemented in a Japanese public school in Taiwa Town, Miyagi Prefecture, and it aimed to create an adequate environment that could provide a teaching-learning process in the cognitive, emotional, and social aspects to prepare the students to live in Japan, as well as to prepare them for their return to Brazil in the future.

Creationism and Evolution Views of Brazilian Teachers and Teachers-to-Be

This paper aims at assessing the evolutionist and creationist conceptions of Brazilian teachers. The work is developed within the framework of the European project BIOHEAD-CITIZEN （biology, health and environmental education for better citizenship）, which takes into account that scientific knowledge and teachers＇ attitudes and values can influence the teaching practices. The large questionnaire BIOHEAD-CITIZEN, which was constructed to be applied in 19 countries in Europe, Africa and Middle East countries, was applied, in this study, to six groups of Brazilian teachers： primary school teachers, biology teachers and Portuguese language teachers and corresponding teachers-to-be. For this paper the answers to questions about evolution were used as dependent variables. Descriptive and multivariate analyses were carried out. Biology teachers and biology teachers-to-be gave more importance to the natural selection and the evolution process than the other groups of teachers. Comparing to the BIOHEAD-CITIZEN countries, the total Brazilian sample showed a higher percentage of creationist conceptions, particularly the Brazilian biology teachers and teachers-to-be. As discussed herein, this may not be an obstacle for teaching evolution as they accept both creationist and evolutionist concomitantly.

Emotions in Language Teaching: A Review of Studies on Teacher Emotions in Brazil

In this paper, we wish to respond to the call for expansion on our knowledge about teacher beliefs(Kubanyiova & Feryok, 2015) and discuss findings of studies on teacher emotions conducted in Brazil with both in-service and pre-service teachers of English. More specifically, we focus 1) on the kinds of emotions these teachers have reported feeling, and 2) on the relationship between beliefs and emotions. The results have shown: 1) the diversity of emotions teachers experience in their teacher education;and 2) how these emotions interact in dynamic and complex ways with their beliefs about teaching English in Brazil. The findings suggest that looking into the interrelationships between emotions and beliefs can shed light onto our understanding of the teachers’ thinking and practices in their contexts. Implications and questions for further research will be discussed in light of the studies reviewed.