Ensino de astronomia em aulas de física do ensino médio: desafios e possibilidades

Abstract

Astronomy originated from human curiosity and need to unravel the great cosmic mysteries. Thus, observation sky-celestial unleashed, together with human development, the acquisition of impressive knowledge, which significantly helped in the way of life of certain civilizations. Today Astronomy represents an important science that directly or indirectly affects the daily lives of numbers of people, mainly due to the technological advances related to it. Likewise, in the educational sphere, the teaching of Astronomy has an undeniable agreement. In addition to being highly motivational, it helps to approach approaches such as the History and Philosophy of Science and Science, Technology and Society, favors the preparation of experimental activities, is highly interdisciplinary and makes up a space for reflection about the world and our role about it. Although it offers such a great contribution to the teaching of Science, researches show that Astronomy has been forgotten within basic education spaces. In this bias, we sought, through this research, to understand what possibilities and limits for the insertion of Astronomy subjects in Physics classes in Basic Education. Therefore, we seek to: identify and analyze which learning related to Astronomy is included in the Common National Curriculum Base; to verify the approach of Astronomy subjects in Textbooks adopted by Physics teachers from the State Basic Education schools of Santa Maria / RS and investigate how Astronomy is taught in Physics classes in High School, aiming to identify the possibilities and as limitations for the insertion of the area. It is a qualitative research, whose corpus of analysis is composed of Physics teachers from state schools of Basic Education belonging to 8° CRE - Santa Maria / RS and the textbooks adopted by them. In methodological terms, for data collection we used online questionnaires, which were later analised by the guidelines of the fundamented Theory; allowing us to see that there is still a large number of teachers who do not include Astronomy in their educational practices. In addition, we analyzed the three volumes of the textbook Physics, Contexts & Applications, a collection adopted by the largest number of schools in our corpus, where we found that there are few astronomical contents worked on in depth. We believe that, based on the understanding of how Astronomy is taught in Basic Education, we are contributing to the expansion and improvement of teaching in the same region.