Cacau: Articulação entre Ensino de Química e Literatura Regional na Produção de um Cenário Integrador

Abstract

More than decoding codes, symbols and letters, the practice of reading involves the act of internalization and critical reflection about what has been read. In this way the reader takes on new interpretations and different world views. Reading becomes fascinating when the reader has the autonomy to interpret it and then generate new meanings and meanings for different contexts. Thinking about a teaching of chemistry that is concerned with discussing social issues beyond the scientific content, literature can be a facilitating tool for dialogue on social issues. However, knowing that traditional education makes this dialogue between science and social problems difficult, the use of literature can boost curricular redesign. In this article, we developed a proposal for curricular redesign called Integrator Scenario in the context of a full-time high school in the south of Bahia in order to investigate how students relate to literature and specifically to the regional literary work called “Cocoa” by the writer Jorge Amado. Thirty-three high school students from the Full-Time High School’s Education of Itabuna (CIEI) participated in this research. These answered a questionnaire with a semi-structured script and wrote textual productions from individual and group activities. Thus, all data prepared by the students were analyzed by means of the Discursive Textual Analysis (ATD) through which four categories of analysis were identified, two a priori categories, which are: a) Reading practice and b) Impressions about the relationship between science, literature and imagination. And, two emerging categories which were defined as: c) Relationship between reading and the school environment, d) Understanding about the processes of chocolate. The results of this research revealed that the students have little approximation even with the literary works that portray the regional context of the South of Bahia, where the students live. On the other hand, some students positively evaluated the activities that promote reading in chemistry class, recognizing them as innovative, associating reading with the development of imagination.