Photosynthesis process as school contents: Secondary school textbook’s analysis

Abstract

Photosynthesis is an extremely complex and fundamental phenomenon for the development of life. An inquiry was made of this subject in secondary school textbooks for two reasons: on one hand, the textbook, considered as an element to settle down the curricular prescriptions and an intermediary in the teaching and learning processes, acquires fundamental relevance for the research in didactics of the natural sciences; on the other hand, the process of photosynthesis is excessively simplified, with deformed visions in most school texts, which generates a restricted and erroneous conception of it, producing processes of external aging of knowledge and mechanization. These concepts are from Chevallard. This article analyzes the way in which the concepts and theories related to the vegetal nutrition process are presented and developed in school texts. For the analysis, aspects related to the historical construction of the discourse on photosynthesis were
taken into account, as well as different ways of characterizing scientific knowledge from different epistemological perspectives.