Que isso não fique entre nós: a educação para sexualidades na formação de professores de Ciências Biológicas a partir das percepções de egressos da UFC

Abstract

Sex education constitutes a fundamental dimension of school education, being directly related to the promotion of human rights, the appreciation of diversity, and the construction of critical and inclusive pedagogical practices. However, its approach in the context of basic education is still marked by silences, resistance, and conceptual reductions, which highlights the importance of initial teacher education in this field. This study aims to analyze how the education provided by the Federal University of Ceará (UFC) contributes to the training of undergraduate students in Biological Sciences to address the topic of sexualities in the school context. The research is characterized as a qualitative study, based on the application of online questionnaires sent to 27 graduates of the Biological Sciences Teaching Degree program at UFC. Of these, only 11 had responded by December 2025, articulating the participants’ perceptions with the researcher’s formative trajectory. The responses were analyzed based on theoretical frameworks that discuss teacher education, curriculum, and sex education. The results indicate that, although training in Biological Sciences provides a consistent foundation in subject-specific content, sex education is addressed in an unsatisfactory and poorly structured manner throughout the course, often remaining restricted to individual initiatives or extracurricular spaces. The identified gaps are associated with the predominance of a biological perspective, which tends to limit sexuality to anatomical and physiological aspects, to the detriment of its social, affective, cultural, and political dimensions. This scenario is further aggravated by institutional contexts marked by conservatism and religious fundamentalism, which generate insecurity and silence in teaching practice. Despite these limitations, the study also identified strategies of resistance and pedagogical reinvention adopted by some graduates, who seek to incorporate sex education into their practices in a critical and sensitive manner. These findings indicate that teacher education is shaped by multiple dimensions of human experience and point to the need for an initial training process that critically and structurally incorporates sex education as an inseparable dimension of the pedagogical practice of Biology teachers.