O Rio Paraguaçu como uma questão sociocientífica para o ensino de Zoologia

Abstract

Zoology is the study of animal life and, in teaching, is integrated with Science in Elementary School and with Biology in High School. The teaching of Zoology encounters numerous difficulties such as scarcity of equipment and resources, making the classes abstract, without experimentation and far from the reality of the students. Aquatic ecosystems can be explored to teach Zoology content, raising questions that help in the understanding of different animal taxa. However, field trips involve financial resources and are almost always unfeasible. Municipalities located on the banks or near water bodies can offer these resources as central themes in the teaching and learning process, using the contextualization of Biology topics. The present work aims to learn about the teaching practices used by high school Biology teachers in municipalities of the Recôncavo da Bahia, bordering the Paraguaçu River basin, in order to analyze whether they approach the river as a theme for teaching Zoology contents. for a Socioscientific Question (SSI) centered on the Paraguaçu River and adjacent water bodies for the study of Zoology topics. In a qualitative approach, teachers were surveyed through an electronic questionnaire via Google Forms. The data revealed that, among the tools most used in the classes, the blackboard/whiteboard is the most frequent. Although the Paraguaçu River is little used as a pedagogical tool, 80% of the participants of this research consider it indispensable to contextualize the Zoology contents with situations and/or examples present in the students' daily lives, such as those related to the Paraguaçu River. The results also show that most of the research participants know about the SSIs, but only 20% of them use them in their classes. In order to spread the knowledge about SSI and bring the student's reality to the formal teaching environment, a SSI about the fishing in the Paraguaçu River was elaborated. As additional material, an informative video on SSI was produced. With the studies carried out, it was possible to realize that the use of SSI in education can be a viable option to address the Paraguaçu River and its fauna and provide students with a more contextualized and problematizing learning.