Ensino de botânica: uma experiência de incentivo à aprendizagem significativa e cooperativa

Abstract

Botany is an interdisciplinary area within Biology, which allows its approach in different contexts. Often, the existence of so many concepts and theories, make this subject unattractive and complicated in the eyes of students. Because of this, there is a need to encourage learning methodologies that help change this reality. Aiming to use elements of meaningful and cooperative learning in botany teaching, an experimental class was conducted with the subject matter fruits in the discipline of Morphology and Taxonomy of Spermatophytes with students of the Biological Sciences course. Meaningful learning is a model developed by David Ausubel that considers the student's prior knowledge as the starting point in the educational process. In turn, cooperative learning basically addresses group work, where members take on roles in the study and together achieve a common goal. The class took place at pre-set times where the fundamental criteria of cooperative and meaningful learning could be implemented. The strategies for the use of methodologies have proved effective in improving the teachinglearning process, however, we must consider the time of adaptation of students to the use of these methodologies, since most students are very accustomed to intellectual passivity encouraged in traditional teaching.