A unidade de Botânica nos livros didáticos de ciências aprovados no Programa Nacional do Livro Didático – PNLD/2017

Abstract

Plants are among the oldest living beings on the planet and to understand their characteristics, physiology and evolutionary history is to understand how life itself has diversified and established interdependencies between different biological groups. And while the human species is dependent on the plants, there is a lack of interest in understanding it. This negligence or plant blindness permeates the botany teaching and has been reinforced by a traditional teaching with extensive nomenclature and outside the modern context. Although research in science education points to the diversity of methodologies, the textbook is still a widely used resource. In this scenario, PNLD is an important program that evaluates and distributes textbook to public schools. The present work aimed to understand the context of botany teaching in public elementary schools in Uberlândia - MG, analyzing the content of natural science textbooks approved by PNLD 2017 and the reports of biology teachers about its use in botany teaching. Botany units from ten textbooks approved by PNLD 2017 were analyzed and an online questionnaire was conducted with 45 teachers. Bardin's content analysis method was employed to dialogically analyze how this content is presented in books and biology teachers use this feature. The analyzes showed that Botany is represented in the penultimate or last unit and correspond to 7.9 to 20% of the textbooks pages, with a variation that goes from 19 to 67 pages. The content of Botany is more descriptive than evolutionary and brings themes such as diversity and reproduction of groups, morphology, aspects of physiology and evolution, with varying detail and approach. The textbooks are well illustrated, featuring schemes and photographs that exemplify plant biodiversity, but have little representation of regional species. The schemes lack indications of the size of the structures in detail. Images, activities and textual content are the resources most used by teachers to teach botany and coincide with the criteria used to evaluate the textbook. Research, experiments, supplementary texts, and chapter opening strategies have been little or not used by teachers and represent alternatives for making the content more contextual and appealing to students. The textbook is used by 44 teachers and 25% of them claim to use other resources for botany teaching such as practical activities. Most teachers (36) claim to have an affinity with Botany and 11 highlight the extensive content of the teaching year as a factor that hinders the development of the subject. These data reinforce the need for teacher autonomy to critically select the contents and strategies presented in textbooks to teach botanic biodiversity.