Elaboração e avaliação de uma sequência didática com abordagem Ciência, Tecnologia, Sociedade e Ambiente (CTSA): abrindo as caixas pretas smartphone e tabela periódica

Abstract

The periodic table of chemical elements is a structuring content of the Chemistry discipline, taught in the final years of Elementary School and first year of High School. Through a bibliographic survey, in the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD), on “periodic table” in the period from 2016 to 2022, we observed that none of the works explored the Science, Technology, and Society (STS) approach nor Science, Technology, Society, and Environment (STSE) and or technological artifacts, such as the smartphone for the teachinglearning of this object of knowledge. This finding indicates a knowledge gap, which can be explored in chemistry teaching. It contemplates the skills and competencies provided for Nature Sciences and their Technologies, defended by normative and guiding curricular documents of Basic Education. Thus, considering the Latourian conception, both the periodic table and the smartphone can be regarded as black boxes in the sense of being explored only as tools in the educational context. These facts motivated the elaboration of a Didactic Sequence (DS) that allowed us to relate the object of knowledge periodic table with the smartphone, a technological artifact. Thus, there is the mediation of this knowledge from the parameters and educational purposes of the STS approach defended by Strieder and Kawamura (2017). After the development of the DS, the question that guided the continuity of the research was: what are teachers’ perceptions about the presence/applicability of parameters and purposes of the STS approach in the DS? To this end, an extension course was developed with practicing teachers to present and evaluate the DS. To assess the didactic potential of the DS were invited teachers from the context of practice who was teaching Chemistry in Basic Education and or working in management/pedagogical guidance positions related to Secondary Education. The evaluations of the seven research participants regarding the applicability and types of didactic resources presented in the DS indicate the feasibility of applying the DS in the classroom context, as well as the selected didactic resources. The limitations presented by the participants were the need for a more significant number of classes to carry out all the meetings proposed in the DS and the student’s difficulties in reading Scientific Communication Texts. The participants considered that the DS would contribute to the instrumentalization of teachers/users of the didactic resource produced, as it presents a considerable amount of information related to the four elements of the STS relationship. It was evident from the participants’ responses that, by exploring the smartphone technological artifact, using an STSE approach, the teaching of the periodic table knowledge object can be better understood and valued by Basic Education students. Considering the DS developed and the evaluation of the research participants, as a contribution to this research, we present the educational product (EP) entitled: “How many elements of the periodic table are needed to make a smartphone?”.