Textos complementares em livros de química geral do ensino superior: uma análise para a interdisciplinaridade

Abstract

In the quest for democratization, the number of higher education institutions has increased - and still increases - in Brazil, creating complex challenges for university education. One of these challenges is certainly to provide an education capable of training teachers for the contemporaneous world. Interdisciplinarity emerges as a new epistemological perspective of knowledge that can contribute to success in this mission. As a polysemous term, interdisciplinarity finds many obstacles in the teaching practice, as much as in the basic school as in the university, because it goes against the ingrained disciplinary structure. In this sense, it is necessary the existence of interdisciplinary proposals for teacher training, once that by living them, there is a greater chance of continuity of this proposal in the school. It is important to understand that the training of university professors often does not cover the pedagogical foundations of teaching, leading to the permanence of traditional practices in higher education. This problem is aggravated to the extent that these professionals do not exercise a reflective practice and do not participate in contexts of continuing education directed to teaching. Thus, the aim of this study is to verify the possibility of complementary texts in a textbook of general chemistry (TGC) of higher education are intercessors of interdisciplinarity in chemistry courses, especially regarding teacher training. In order to select the book whose complementary texts were analyzed, we investigated the loan data in the libraries of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora and the use of TGCs by teachers (5) and students (18 incoming and 7 graduating) of the same institution. We also investigated the concepts of interdisciplinarity and the use of complementary texts using questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. From these data, 18 complementary texts of the TGC most used in the degree course of Chemistry were analyzed, based on the references of the content analysis. The results reaffirm the polysemy of interdisciplinarity and provide important information on the use of the textbook in the course of Chemistry, such as selection criteria, for example. Analyses of the complementary texts revealed that more than 80% of them present the potential for an interdisciplinary approach. Thus, a proposal is made to explore complementary texts based on research teaching, in order to provide an alternative to the insertion of reading and interdisciplinarity in the training of Chemistry teachers.