A representação feminina nos livros didáticos do novo PNLD à luz da teoria das representações sociais.

Abstract

Teachers and students of the public school system receive the textbooks from the Brazilian textbook program (PNLD). Alongside the reforms of the public high school system and the National Curriculum (BNCC), the textbooks are now sorted by academic field instead of school subject. These books have a variety of languages beyond text, such as images, cartoons, pictures, illustrations, comic strips etc, which often carry prejudice and stereotypes. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to show the current situation of feminine representation in the images present in the textbooks collections selected by the 2021 PNLD (currently used in schools) as well as the contexts of those images. The analysis was developed specifically in the Field of the Natural Sciences and their Technologies (CNT), that is Physics, Chemistry and Biology. The content of the images in the seven collections (of six textbooks each) was analyzed and categorized according to a quantitative and a qualitative approach. The first approach was used to count the frequency of appearances of each gender in the pictures of the textbooks. That is, the number of representations of female, male and non-identified gender. The second approach refers to an analysis of social indicators of the representations considering the context of the pictures. The theoretical basis of the analysis involved Gender Theories and Social Representations Theory (TRS). Overall, in the textbooks, the female representation improved, in comparison to older PNLD versions, both in numbers and in quality. Although it was noticeable that there was a greater male representation, the women were shown in a variety of situations, performing different activities, thus contributing to the denaturalization of gender stereotypes and to the construction of new social representations.