Reflexões sobre o ensino de química orgânica na educação básica - análise das compreensões de (futuros) professores

Abstract

Despite of the epistemological conception that reduced the Chemistry teaching to the transmission of contents had been overcome, Organic Chemistry in basic education is still limited to the teaching of the nomenclature rules and classification of organic compounds. Meanwhile, experimental activities are slightly performed in public schools and are still conceived from an empirical-inductive understanding of what Science is. Thus, reasoning experiments to meet the necessity of mediate the teaching and learning processes of Organic Chemistry is a laborious task for teachers and researchers of the field. In this sense, this work aims to reflect on different aspects related to the teaching of Organic Chemistry, especially regarding the insertion of experimental activities for the study of organic compounds in basic education. This study is supported by theoretical references that deal with Chemistry teaching, teacher education and experimentation as a didactic resource for Science classes. Also, this work aims to identify trends and perceptions about Organic Chemistry in a school from a qualitative research by applying methods of document analysis and survey of perceptions of different groups of subjects directly and indirectly related to the teaching of Organic Chemistry in basic education. Future Chemistry teachers, Chemistry teachers who teach in basic education or in Organic Chemistry classes at a Bachelor course are involved in the research. The perceptions of these subjects about the issues discussed in this research were collected from semi-structured interviews that were transcribed, analyzed and categorized. The obtained results indicate a significant distance between the Organic Chemistry contents covered in the National Exam of High School (Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio – ENEM), the official documents, and what is worked in the classes. In addition, it was possible to notice the lack of experiments related to these contents in the literature and to identify the poorly conceptual and methodological diversity among the found experiments that, in their majority, would not be easily executed in the elementary schools, as the data triangulation obtained in this research reveals.