Ensinar Física a partir dos conhecimentos que os alunos explicitam: desafios e limites de uma prática pedagógica.

Abstract

This study presents, analyses and discusses the results of a pedagogical work developed under the hypothesis of working with Physics contents from what students seem to bring in terms of their cultural and experience background. Through the application of a differentiated methodological praxis for the teaching of electricity, it was possible to follow a pathway that allowed us to look at the possibility of thinking over how the teaching of Physics is taking place nowadays. The experience involved a third year high school group of a state school in Pelotas, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. We tried to launch a challenge in the sense of thinking the teaching from a different point of view, one that could enlarge the perspective of the scientific rationality, at the same time that such teaching also respected differences and sought another kind of relation in the classrooms of that subject. The main purpose was to rescue and value the knowledge brought by the students’ everyday lives to the classroom, and, based on them, develop the Physics contents so as to encourage learners to relate their previous knowledge to the topic being taught. By doing so, we aimed at helping students to better understand the phenomena involved in the contents of Physics, making its studies less uninteresting for them. The results were promising in the sense of showing that, even though there is some resistance to a student-centered teaching, we can really think of another logic for the teaching of Physics, and that such perspective must be present in courses that form teachers.