A importância da história da química para o ensino contextualizado da ciência química.

Abstract

Chemistry is a subject with numerous concepts which may be complex to the high school students’ comprehension and the contextualized and interdisciplinary teaching of chemistry is one of the ways to make the assimilation of the contents easier to the learners. Being the history of chemistry a tool of great assistance for this task, it was sought to investigate in this work their already reported applications in classroom, to collect opinions of concluding students or graduated ones about the issue through a questionnaire and to gather some data about the universities with respect to the offering of the discipline “history of chemistry” in the respective courses curricula. The results show that a good number of the 34 graduating and graduated interviewees are sympathetic to the idea of the application of the history of chemistry, both in the professional preparation and in given classes and they quote the reasons of its little applicability on the daily teaching. They also quoted personal experiences in the course regarding the knowledge obtained under the university about the subject and they gave suggestions on how to improve the applicability of the history of chemistry and contextualization in the classroom. Furthermore, it was made a data collection about the courses of chemistry teaching of 59 federal universities from Brazil and their respective offerings of the subject “history of chemistry”, being it mandatory or optative with the goal of measure those data, and there’s a presence of this discipline in 40 of them. To conclude, it was sought to show how the act of teaching working the concepts combined with the students’ conjuncture can bring positive results and it was also brought forward suggestions for a better preparation of the professionals of the chemistry teaching area.