Introduction

This article aims to present the results of a study on the city based on the concepts of territory ⁴and citizenship, supported by a theoretical- methodological framework, carried out in Geography classes. Pedagogical practices have helped students to be able to understand reality, analyzing it from data obtained through investigative and argumentative activities that stimulate reasoning and present information that can be compared. It is through these recontextualized and meaningful practices that students can make sense of the study of Geography. Therefore, in this investigation, an association between method, concepts and categories of Geography was sought to analyze the teaching and learning process (^{CASTELLAR et al , 2021}).

The educational formation of children and young people is usually a permanent concern in the most diverse societies and school has a fundamental role nowadays, especially for students from less prestigious classes. This fact makes it important to understand that pedagogical contexts can contribute to citizen education. We know that the customs, values, norms, skills, knowledge and culture of a society are also transmitted at school and are influenced by the family, the media, the community, among others.

School, being a locus that aims to guarantee social and cultural reproduction, is usually the biggest reference when it comes to socialization. Thinking about what is desirable for the learning of young people in general, within the walls of the school, determining what knowledge you want to share and what goals you want to achieve from them should be a fundamental reflection for educators. One way to materialize educational ideas is through the construction of the curriculum, in which desires and priorities in relation to Education for the formation of citizens can be discussed, raised and formalized.

We start from the premise that education of children and young people takes place in different spaces and forms, but we defend that school must have different or broader learning contents from those that occur in students´ daily experiences with their family and community. Approaching Michael ^{Young's conceptions (2007}; 2011) about his understanding of school and how knowledge can become powerful, we agree with this idea, when we enable students to acquire knowledge that goes beyond their already acquired experiences, knowledge that does not take place at home, with friends, or in the communities in which they live, but at school.

It is, therefore, an article that presents research data based on a qualitative-interpretative methodology, with students from the 9th year of Elementary School, reinforcing the idea of the need to have conceptual constructions and superior logical operations that enhance the construction of knowledge and the processes that lead to conceptual and argumentative changes, aiming at a more significant learning process in schools and, in fact, making the student the protagonist. The investigation question was elaborated from the understanding that learning can be more effective and meaningful, when recontextualized and the student is the subject of his knowledge process. In this sense, the research problem that was addressed is the solution of problems and the argumentative construction could, through a didactic sequence, stimulate the student to understand the concept of territory from the city and in this way contribute to citizen formation?

Data analysis based on the theoretical body of the research serves to deepen the meaning that teaching by argumentation has for pedagogical practices and enable the student to understand geographic concepts so that he can understand reality and, consequently, geographical reasoning.

The article is organized as follows: the theoretical and methodological bases that underlie the research; the concepts of curriculum, pedagogy and recontextualization in ^{Bernstein (1996}; 1988) lead to the research methodology; the analysis of the research instruments and the results, which were described and interpreted to understand their implications in Geography as a powerful knowledge.

The curriculum and pedagogical practices

Powerful knowledge is characterized by being abstract, conceptual, concerned with the general rather than the particular, being systematized, reliable, but open to questioning, and independent of direct experience (^{YOUNG et al, 2014}, p. 168). This refers to a knowledge that differs from everyday knowledge. The knowledge that we aim to be transmitted at school is validated, systematized, specialized knowledge, distinct from common sense and opinions. It is knowledge derived from the sciences that offers us the most refined form of interpretations we have about the world in which we live and whose construction process favors generalization rather than specific contexts. This aspect implies reducing inequalities in access to knowledge.

To reflect on curriculum and pedagogy, ^{Bernstein (1988}) presented concepts that help to clarify the idea of how these pedagogical messages, in other words, how the selection of scientific knowledge that we want to share constitutes the “what” of this curriculum, are transmitted.

Recontextualizing is a rule that requires scientific knowledge to be selected, adapted for the purposes of the classroom - of the family, or of the place where a relationship of transmission and acquisition is intended to be built - and, therefore, this pedagogical discourse created becomes another text, a knowledge that is different, despite being the fruit, of academic knowledge. Building classes from the perspective of recontextualization implies establishing foundations and strategies for teaching and content that include learning that enables powerful knowledge, in the sense of “how” to carry it out in pedagogical practice. In order to recontextualize it is important that teacheres are aware of the theoretical and methodological choices and their philosophical options, the cultural influences in the selection of them for the performance and to develop the pedagogical practice and discourse. Thus, it is necessary to be clear about what these foundations are to plan and apply what is intended.

The pedagogical device, that is, the grammar of pedagogical discourse, is a concept in Bernstein that helps us to understand this way of how messages are transmitted. The device is composed of three hierarchically related rules: distributive, recontextualizing and evaluative rules. Thinking about these rules refers, in our interpretation, to a parallel with the concepts of scientific/academic knowledge and school knowledge. Academic knowledge for the aforementioned author is related to what he calls distributive rules, which constitute the production of knowledge, which occurs, especially, in universities. When reformulated, this academic knowledge arrives in schools. The recontextualization rules organize this reproduced knowledge.

Recontextualization can be carried out by the State when establishing a common curriculum for educational institutions, or by the teacher when analyzing their classroom practice, the pedagogical environment. With the re-reading that the teacher does to plan and teach his classes, he also recontextualizes the contents. Finally, the evaluative rules concern the criteria, sequencing and rhythms established for the transmission-acquisition processes.

Curriculum refers to the interaction between different epistemic communities - of the discipline, the teacher and the students - that must be taken into account (^{FIRTH, 2011}). The student and the teacher arrive in the classroom with previous ideas about the teaching/learning process. School knowledge must combine both knowledge - academic knowledge and everyday knowledge - to have a chance of being successful. Thus, recontextualizing will involve both the selection and organization of what must be acquired - creating and systematizing the content that will be acquired - and relate it to the context in which it must be acquired (^{BERNSTEIN, 1988}, p. 70). A specific pedagogical discourse, that of pedagogical practice, which relates everyday knowledge with academics, which we could call school knowledge, will be created through principles of selection, reordering and refocusing of scientific subjects for the classroom purposes. Thus, these curricular and pedagogical choices will be alternatives to promote the intellectual development of students. From the perspective of recontextualization, pedagogical practices are relevant to the extent that students are stimulated and involved, as the contents make sense to them.

The field of investigation: context, subjects and process

The research was carried out in 2018 in a public school in Cubatão, SP, with one hundred students in the last year of Elementary School, aged between 13 and 14. More than half of them live in the neighborhoods that are close to the school. In general, one to two people in the family contribute to the family income, which mostly varies from 1 to 2 minimum wages.

The research instrument was structured in an investigative didactic sequence with a focus on argumentation teaching. The strategy used, the investigative didactic sequence (^{SASSERON, 2015}), mobilized the student to argue from a problem close to the students' reality, turning knowledge into a useful instrument to critically read reality. In this context, that of resignifying Geography teaching, we have no doubt that scientific reasoning, teaching by investigation (^{CARLI and MORAES, 2019}), Scientific Literacy (SL), the role of language and argumentation are highlighted and recurring themes in the current literature on science teaching and that, within the purposes of training for citizenship and enriching students' everyday knowledge, need to be incorporated into geographic education. SL, inquiry teaching and argumentation are intrinsically connected. Scientific literacy is constituted as the objective of a teaching sequence in a didactic approach that takes place through teaching by investigation that promotes, in turn, argumentation, contributing to the development of students' scientific reasoning. In geographic education, this pedagogical perspective undoubtedly places Geography in another status in school curriculum, contributing to the formation of the territorial citizen ⁵(GUTIÉRREZ ^{TAMAYO, 2012a}; 2012b; 2012c; 2011).

In this perspective, lessons were followed by approaches on the concept of city, urban and urbanization process, and, in lessons 8 to 10, students, gathered in groups of 4 people, had to solve the first problem of the city: the Vale Novo problem. In the activity, a private property on top of a mangrove had been occupied by approximately 100 families. Students received the problem proposition together with a notebook with information, maps and data about the community in order to support the group's position in relation to the following problem: should the community remain or leave the area? Students were encouraged to discuss this problem together, weighing the pros and cons of each decision, and, finally, they had to write arguments to support the proposed solution. At this stage, 26 productions were collected for analysis. With the intention of verifying whether the results in relation to the conceptual change about the city would occur individually, in class 17, questions were proposed to the students about migration and occupation of the territory, and they had to work alone. The questions were as follows: if some places in the city should be conservation areas, such as mangroves, why do people occupy them? Why are these territories occupied by the low-income population? How does the city generally receive people from other places? Does the city welcome or expel them? How can the State accommodate them? (^{SOUZA, 2021}). In this last collect, we obtained 72 written productions to be analyzed. To assess whether there was an overcoming of everyday knowledge about the city, we used the criteria of students' ideas about the urban environment (GARCÍA PÉREZ apud^{RUBIO, 2004}) in the analysis of three moments in the sequence.

Building classes from the perspective of argument teaching, present in an investigative didactic sequence, implies establishing foundations and strategies for teaching with content that includes learning with the aim of students to appropriate knowledge and make them powerful for life. Thus, these curricular and pedagogical choices were focused on stimulating the intellectual development of students.

During Geography classes, we started to question why this content is not valued in school curricula. Although Geography is on the curriculum, it is not understood why it is relevant. In this sense, some questions in the context of classes were raised:

These questions served as guidelines for the research objective, which is to identify and verify the understanding of the concept of territory and city based on problem solving and argumentation within a geographical reasoning, in contexts of directed writing.

In seeking to answer the guiding questions, we proposed a class route that would provide students not only with a formal understanding of the categories that structure school geographic knowledge, but that they could apply them when they observed or read a geographic situation (^{SILVEIRA, 1999}), in the municipality of Cubatão-SP, and could see meaning in what they learn at school.

In order to achieve this citizenship education, geographic education must have the following characteristics: alterity in school; student awareness of its territorial structure and its link with democratic institutions; exercise of civic rights; legitimacy of the diversity of points of view; ability to argue and debate; belonging. The idea is that students can think globally and act locally for the benefit of their spaces and communities (^{PALACIOS, 2012}).

In line with the train of thought addressed in Milton ^{Santos' (2007}) Espaço do Cidadão, the idea of citizenship on which we are based is specifically related to basic goods and services that are accessible to the population and also to the awareness of reality as a whole, of a perception and understanding of the dynamics that dictates and surround our world. The citizenship that the aforementioned author deals with concerns the individual and his concrete and individualized rights. Citizenship would be equivalent to or approach the principle of equality, and it needs to be structured in laws and norms, in order to be valid. The conflict that is established is that the principle of equality of citizenship is faced with the social inequality of the capitalist system and class society.

Recontextualizing the concept of territory for students in the final years of Elementary School in Geography classes, led to the study of the urban and the city that students live in, bringing together everyday and theoretical knowledge. Both, the concept of the city and the skills to solve problems and argue, were thought with the objective of contributing to students´ citizenship formation. The questions “what” to teach and “how” to teach were, therefore, guiding this process and proved to be fundamental when we noticed the involvement and the answers of the students during the application of a didactic sequence to elaborate the analysis of the results. The objective of the learning process was to enable a conceptual change in relation to the city, in which the students would appropriate the meaning of the lived territory.

A sequence of 32 lessons that discussed topics about Cubatão was applied (see table 1). The sequence, which in addition to problem solving and argumentation, included reading and interpretation of texts, census data, maps and landscape images, role playing , debates, etc., was developed by the researchers themselves to control the process. Three moments of collect were important: one in the first lesson, in which we got students´previous knowledge, one in lessons 8 to 10, in which students solved a problem in the city in groups and, finally, in class 17 in which individual students answered questions about migration and occupation.

The table organizes the elaboration of the investigative didactic sequence based on authors who work with the concept of territory, among them ^{Tamayo (2011}) and ^{Santos (2006}) that allow establishing a relationship between the concept of city and that of territory, understanding how students perceive the territory lived by them.

The pedagogical intention was for the students to overcome the representation they had of the city in which they lived based on the theoretical discussion of geography. Recontextualization makes it possible to understand, in a more elaborate way, urban phenomena in general.

Learning: results and analysis

The evaluation of the results in relation to the conceptual change was based on the criterion of the students' ideas about the urban environment of García Pérez ( apud^{RUBIO, 2004}). These criteria are made up of five levels of formulation. The first level relates to students' ideas with a synthetic and harmonic perspective on the city. At the third level, students expose a more analytical and critical perspective on the city. At the fifth and final level, students' ideas move into a more systematic and complex perspective on the city. The organization by stages of student assimilation suggests that they start with a simpler level of conceptual understanding to more complex levels, when students are able to argue and apply concepts.

From the first lesson, we proposed students to write a text about what they knew about the city in order to access their previous knowledge. The productions collected revealed ideas closely linked to the daily lives and life experiences of adolescents (77 out of a total of 97 productions). In these mentions, the most frequent mentioned were the cinema, a park and the McDonald's restaurant as important points of reference in the city. Cubatão has been a major industrial hub in Brazil since 1950. The processes of industrialization, urbanization, environmental degradation and slums, which help to explain the causes and consequences of what the city is today, were rarely mentioned (14 of a total of 97 productions). According to the criteria of students' ideas about the urban environment, we interpreted that in general the productions were at a first level of formulation, which is characterized by referring to everyday experiences, to individual interests, approaching city spaces close to the neighborhood. and with few notes of relevant elements about the city.

In each of the classes there was a question contextualized in the problem, such as: why am I in Cubatão, SP? What is there in town to have drawn my family here? Discussions that took place until class 7 .

In lessons 8 to 10, students' arguments revealed a more robust view of the concept of city in the productions when discussing the problem of occupation. The use of data and theoretical references from the lessons collaborated in the elaboration of the productions, and out of a total of 26 productions, only 2 groups showed difficulty in justifying the problem using data and theoretical discussions. Evaluating the content of the students' arguments according to the criterion of García Pérez (apud^{RUBIO, 2004}) there is a significant decrease in productions at the first level of formulation, with most reaching the third level of formulation, in which students overcome everyday experiences of the city using concepts such as infrastructure, types of housing, equipment and value, comparing different neighborhoods and types of housing and recognizing inequality in access to equipment and services between neighborhoods.

The productions of lesson 17 were collected and analyzed in order to corroborate the results obtained in solving the Vale Novo problem. Until then, students had produced written arguments in groups. This time they wrote it by themselves. Of the72 productions collected, 53 leave the first level of formulation, predominating the third level (36), and reaching productions in the fourth level (16) in which the texts present an increase in the scale of analysis, discussion about processes of the city transformation, use of complex concepts such as inequality and explain the city from its peripheric condition.

Let's see examples of each activity according to the level of formulation achieved:

The analyzed results (^{SOUZA, 2018}) show that, through the application of the sequence of lessons, there were indications of a conceptual change of the students in relation to their lived territory. Students demonstrate that they have deepened their knowledge of the city's problems, interrelating and comparing other neighborhoods in their discussions, expanding the scale of analysis they had at the beginning of the sequence, and also building a more specialized discourse about the city. Another finding of the research was the identification of elements of geographic reasoning (^{ROQUE ASCENSÃO; VALADÃO, 2014}; 2017, ^{CASTELLAR, 2019}, CASTELLAR; De PAULA, 2020) in students' productions, such as locate, describe and interpret spatial phenomena, something also identified in a research with a similar content in School Geography (^{CARLI; MORAES, 2019}).

Referring to the classification of students' ideas about the urban environment (GARCÍA PÉREZ apud^{RUBIO, 2004}), we find productions with characteristics of the third level of formulation (in it, the use of concepts such as infrastructure, types of housing, equipment and value appear in the productions. They make comparisons between different neighborhoods and types of housing and go beyond their experiences of life in the urban environment. There´s a initial understanding of neighborhoods´ inequality in access to services and equipment), reaching the fourth level (increased perception of space scale when thinking of neighborhoods that are more distant from students. There is the use of complex concepts such as inequality, conflicts and quality of life. There is a notion of spatial transformation). Therefore, thinking about conceptual change, it can be affirmed that the change present progress compared to the students' productions on lesson 1.

By recontextualizing a relevant concept in academic discussions such as the lived territory in an approach that aimed to investigate the city, the pedagogical strategies developed were able to make students deepen their knowledge, expanding students' repertoire and perception of their lived space. Defining positions, questioning arguments, evaluating options, debating and informing the results are rehearsals that open up enormous possibilities for democratic exercise, through the exchange of ideas and consensus building. Working with problems invited them to search for causalities, informed debate and taking positions (CASO, 2015). Results reinforce the importance of geographic contents in the constitution of a curriculum that values active participation of students in their lived territory. By recognizing more elements and problems of their city, there is a contribution to the formation of the student in relation to their critical and active participation in the processes of creation and transformation of space, collaborating in the construction of students’ citizenship at school.

This reflection on the teaching practice contributes to the strengthening of the discipline in the school curriculum, because it justifies the indispensability of geographic knowledge to the student. These practices strengthen the voice of Geography within the curriculum. Renewing school geography in order to provide students with intellectual tools to critically analyze and interpret the world and promote an autonomous, responsible and solidary positioning in the face of contemporary societies and territories problems is the role of Geography (CASO, 2015).

Returning to the initial questions of the article, we can say that yes, Geography is important for the teaching and learning processes by providing concepts and skills that help students to interpret spatiality and intervene in their reality; yes, its contents have the potential to expand everyday knowledge towards a more theoretical and specialized knowledge, promoting conceptual change and it is for all these reasons that we can defend its position in the curriculum and declare that its knowledge is powerful.

Final considerations

As we move forward with the proposal to intervene in the classroom through a didactic sequence with an emphasis on investigation and argumentation, we are faced with the need for teacher training to be more theoretically and methodologically solid, and that without understanding the pedagogical role or teaching methodology, we will not advance in the relevance that Geography must have in the curriculum. Without pedagogical training, there will be no powerful knowledge, no recontextualization of classroom practices, and no understanding of the importance of historically and socially constructed scientific knowledge, in the case of Geography.

Based on all the references we have made and investigations we have been going through, in order to answer the questions that guided us and for them to be well answered, we need to overcome the restricted idea about the role of teaching and learning. It is necessary to understand that research shows that when problems are well presented and discussed, students appropriate geographic knowledge, acquiring, if possible, a geographic reasoning that can help them to perceive themselves as citizens of the territory in which they live.

This movement may perhaps help to recontextualize Geographic Education. A recontextualized Geography is based on the development of more than thoughts, but reasoning, as the latter requires the use of a propositional and inferential argumentative - dialectic - logic, the result of the connections made by the subject with the experienced and perceived surrounding world, based on a robust vocabulary, strengthening geographic knowledge in the curriculum and in the life of youth and society. Recontextualizing it means strengthening it, not dissociating it from its languages and epistemic nature, and also in the ability to encourage and involve, from provocative and significant geographical situations, the universes of contemporary youth and children, so that they deal with the social problems in an autonomous, creative, rigorous and, above all, emancipatory way, in the search for citizenship and social justice, since Geography is, in the first place, a powerful knowledge.