Os alunos e o ensino de botânica nas escolas: “se tem eu nunca tive”

Abstract

The teaching of biology and science in schools is often approached in an extremely theoretical and expositive way, focusing only on scientific concepts. In several studies it is proposed that this lack of diversification in classes its due to teacher’s insecurity regarding their own knowledge about the subject, which ends up being reflected in the form of teaching of their classes, even though it is a content that is present in several places of the school and in our day-to-day life. We observed that this kind of behavior still persists on botanical classes, generating apathy with this discipline in teachers and students, which ends up becoming constant from school routine through day life. Thus, we proposed in the present work to re-think the teaching and learning of botany through the student's eye. Through this approach one can also understand how the school environment and methodologies can influence the learning of this area of knowledge. For this purpose, a questionnaire with objective and open questions was applied to students from the 3rd year of high school in two schools located in Fortaleza - CE, these questionnaires were later analyzed and interpreted. In the results we can observe how the plants are present in the school, what are the importance in the daily life, how the classes are, how students would like them to be, what subjects they prefer, what materials they usually use for study. Some students do not remember when it was the last time they had a lesson on plants, others were already apathetic and unwilling to participate in the research because they did not know the content and were afraid to "give a wrong answer". Although the schools have environments for greater diversification of classes as gardens, vegetable gardens and laboratories, they are not used. Thus, we can see that the teaching of botany as it occurs, according to the students, has not been useful because it ends up leaving them insecure as far as the knowledge they already have. Listening to the students and looking for new support materials would be ways of modifying the classes to get a better use of both the student and the teacher.