Using productive disciplinary engagement and epistemic practices to evaluate a traditional Brazilian high school chemistry classroom

In this article we explore a dilemma a Brazilian teacher faces: on the one hand, she tries to implement inquiry-based teaching in her high school chemistry classroom. On the other hand, she faces the pressure of her private school, which expects that their students pass the tests needed to attend college. In studying this dilemma, we shall explore the epistemic practices students engage during a lab work as possible indicators of the occurrence of productive disciplinary engagement (PDE). The empirical data was obtained from the video of 6 students working as a group during lab work on thermochemistry and kinetics. The results show that PDE may not be sufficient to analyze the construction of knowledge in more traditional classrooms.