Microbiologia em livros didáticos de ciências e biologia: Abordagem CTS e aplicabilidade do conhecimento.

Abstract

The Didactic Book (LD) is a support material formulated with the purpose of providing support to the pedagogical processes, helping and guiding the teacher within the classroom. In the school context, the teaching-learning process should seek to avoid mere repetition of ideas and to promote students' ability to criticize and recognize the application of scientific knowledge. In order to contribute to this goal, it is fundamental that the Science Technology and Society (CTS) approach coupled with interdisciplinarity and contextualization be inserted in the books. Within the field of Biological Sciences, microbiology consists of one of the themes that allows numerous possibilities of relation with the daily life of the student, since a great part of the microorganisms plays many beneficial roles for life. Despite this, there is still a tendency among students to adopt a negative view of these beings, in particular, by associating them essentially with diseases. In this sense, considering the importance of the book as the main didactic resource used in Basic Education and the predominance of negative or even misconceptions among students about microorganisms, the objective of this research was to analyze how this content is contemplated in LD of Science and Biology, in order to identify, above all, whether the didactic works contemplate the concepts of microbiology in a perspective that allows CTS contextualization, application and approach. The research was developed following three consecutive stages: first, the LD of Sciences and Biology used in municipal, state and private schools of the states of Rio Grande do Norte and Paraíba were selected; then the criteria for the qualitative analysis of microbiology in the works were established; and, finally, a score was assigned for each of the analyzed criteria. From the results obtained, it was observed that the items visual resources and use of complementary texts associated to microbiology were categorized with a satisfactory inclusion in the majority of works analyzed. On the other hand, the criteria of human health, importance and approximation of daily practices in microbiology were classified with a moderate approach in most LD, indicating a non-significant immersion of these requirements. The most disturbing result among the evaluated criteria consisted in the proposition of experimental questions, in which the great majority of works did not make any proposals of practices in microbiology, although they included this area of knowledge descriptively throughout the books. The data described in the present study emphasize that microbiology is not being addressed in a completely substantiated and significant way in most of the LD used in Basic Education. Thus, the results, besides suggesting to Science and Biology teachers, more caution and attention in mediating microbiological knowledge based on the book in the classroom, also serve as an incentive for future research and improvement on the subject in textbooks.