Expondo as raízes: investigação da impercepção botânica na sistemática e evolução de embriófitas no ensino médio.

Abstract

The teaching of botany has been a subject of debate over the past decades. From scientia amabilis to scientia neglecta, botany in schools is often presented as dull, uninteresting, and overly content-based. Adding to this, its representation in the Brazilian curriculum highlights how this science is being erased. These factors, when combined, reinforce the cycle of botanical blindness, a social phenomenon associated with people's detachment from plants and its consequences for humanity. We believe that this phenomenon can be further amplified in basic education if teachers are unprepared or uninterested in teaching botany, particularly when students begin to formally study botany for the first time. In this context, we aim to investigate the roots of plant awareness disparity through two approaches: (Chapter 1) the first involves a five-year literature review (2018-2022) to understand what has been published on the subject for basic education, and thereby comprehend the current panorama of the phenomenon; and (Chapter 2) to understand the dilemmas of the teaching and learning process of botany in basic education in high school classes, using a public school in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, as a model. For both approaches, we follow a qualitative methodology, inspired by analytical tools such as Discursive Textual Analysis (Chapter 1) and Content Analysis (Chapter 2). The results indicate: (Chapter 1) a growing interest in the subject and various proposals to address botanical imperception in high school, the stage with the highest number of studies; interestingly, both early and final years of elementary school lack studies on the subject. Other results indicate (Chapter 2) the challenges faced by teachers in teaching botany, including bureaucracy, lack of support for conducting practical lessons, and an extensive workload—issues not recently discussed in the literature. Moreover, despite the use of diversified methodologies, internalizing botany in students remains a challenge. Generally, they believe that practical lessons could make learning more engaging. Finally, some considerations emerged from this investigation, such as: the need for continuous teacher training for botany instruction; focusing on the contextualization of botanical topics so that students associate the presence of plants with human life (medicine, food, agricultural practices, clothing, etc.); and the importance of returning the results obtained to schools to assist in changes to teacher planning and curriculum composition, aiming to overcome the barriers in botany education.