A experimentação nos livros didáticos de Ciências dos anos iniciais do Ensino Fundamental

Abstract

There is substantial potential for the use of experimentation in Science classes for two main reasons: it facilitates an appropriate comprehension about the scientific process and it can motivate students, due to its ludic feature. However, there are different ways of working with experimentation, one of them being the investigative way. Inquire-Based learning has been advocated by several researchers in the last years as an alternative for traditional teaching. Among their arguments is the idea that such an investigation can provide autonomy for the student as well as a closer relationship to his everyday experience, going beyond memorization and repetition. In this context, it is necessary to debate the Science textbook, since this material is often the most (if not the only) used in the classroom. The program that oversees the selection of textbooks is called Programa Nacional do Livro Didático, and has gone through several changes since its beginning. Nowadays, the selection occurs every three years and there are specific criteria for the material to be approved. Considering these aspects, in this paper we discuss the experimentation on Science textbooks by analyzing how it present itself in the collection for elementary school years used in Cascavel – PR on the triennium of 2016-2018. The central question of this research is: are the experimentation activities from municipal schools textbooks adopted on the triennium 2016-2018 close to assumptions of Inquire-Based learning? The methodology includes bibliographic research about experimentation and textbooks as well as the “state-of-the-art” regarding what other recently published papers have discussed about experimentation. The documental research comprehends a comparative analysis between the municipal curriculum and the collection in use in Cascavel, besides the analysis of experimentation activities. Articles and experimentation activities were submitted to an analysis by Discursive Textual Analysis (DTA). The results obtained point to the intense valorization of the Inquire-Based learning in the academic production of the Education field, but on the other side, also to the removal of its characteristic elements from the experimentation as presented in the textbooks. Regarding educational tendencies, it was verified that the activities present both elements from empiricism-inductivism as well as constructivist theory. Thus, in spite of encouraging student independence and teacher mediation, there is a lack of support that would allow to classify the activities as investigative, since they approach Inquire-Based learning assumptions in only one single moment of the activity (either in the beginning or the end). We highlight the use of DTA as a possible analysis methodology for documental researches, especially for textbooks, due to it being underexplored so far, despite presenting other possibilities.