Uma proposta para o ensino das estações do ano com base em um referencial topocêntrico

Abstract

Studies carried out in several countries have confirmed the students’ difficulty in explaining the causes of the seasons of the year, and most of times their learning takes place incorrectly. The seasons of the year have been generally treated in didactic books apart from people´s routine, based on the heliocentric system, what demands abstraction to understand the phenomenon. Before this difficulty, it is necessary to think about a teaching proposal which allows the students to realize the environmental characteristics and its changes over time, as well as the seasons themselves. Thus, our goal was to work from the perspective of the observer on the terrestrial surface, therefore using the topocentric system. For that, we constructed a didactic sequence, grounded in Ausubel´s meaningful learning theory (2003) and in Moreira´s critical meaningful learning theory (2010), which was applied to students in 9th grade of elementary school and in 2th grade of high school at Escola Estadual Jerônimo Arantes, in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, owing to their previous knowledge and alternative conceptions, which were collected via interviews. Afterwards, to evaluate the applied methodology, we made new interviews, by which we realized improvement in learning in relation to the characteristics of the seasons based on Sun´s apparent path, which we attribute to reference the change of observation and the means to obtain data on the volume of rainfall and average temperature in the city throughout the year. On the other hand, there are points that were not highlighted in learning, such as the link between winter and rainy season and the causes of the seasons, points left to be discussed in future investigations.