Banca de QUALIFICAÇÃO: FABRÍCIA DANTAS

Chemical equilibrium in higher education general chemistry textbooks: how to relate aspects of contextualization and Johnstone's triangle

contextualization; Johnstone Triangle; Chemical equilibrium;

Contextualization is an aspect that has been discussed for decades, becoming a more frequent discussion based on guidelines in legal documents such as the Federal Constitution of 1998, in the Curriculum Parameters of the early 2000s, National Curriculum Guidelines for Basic Education in 2013 and more recently also in the National Curriculum Base. Although these discussions are not so recent, it is noted that the teaching of chemistry is still based on a fragmented, memoristic and poorly reflective teaching, this becomes a big problem, since most chemistry undergraduates do not experience the process teaching/learning chemical concepts in a contextualized, interdisciplinary way and also with a good part of textbooks, which play great importance both as study material and material used for class planning, outside of this perspective. Thus, it is common to find these same undergraduates when in their future teaching practice, reproducing a practice that was experienced in their graduation, entering a cycle that has been repeated for decades and without much success. Thus, making use of an approach that facilitates and brings these concepts closer to the student's reality seems to be a good way to go for those who want to go beyond the decoding of this Science. Thus, through the analysis carried out in four textbooks of General Chemistry in Higher Education, we seek to evidence some contextualization approaches designed to the topics of chemical equilibrium content, as well as the relationships between the three levels of representation of chemistry (macroscopic, submicroscopic and symbolic) discussing the pedagogical implications of these concepts for the teaching and learning process of this content. As this is a qualitative research, whose source of data to be investigated are texts from higher education textbooks, Bardin's Content Analysis served as a source of data analysis. The data collected in the first stage of the analysis were organized into units of meaning and categorized based on their similarities and differentiation (intermediate analysis categories), with subsequent regrouping, based on common characteristics (final analysis categories). The analysis of the categories presented in this research has pointed out that these textbooks, in addition to emphasizing aspects of chemistry representation that corroborate with very frequent difficulties in this content, prioritize contexts outside the reality of students, especially in the context of production of this research, which is the city of Natal in Rio Grande do Norte.