The STSE orientation in textbooks: an investigation into one of the Physics titles recommended by the Brazilian Ministry of Education

Abstract

One of the main resources used in the classroom in Basic Education is the textbook, which over time has been adapting to the requirements of official education bodies and also to changes in society imposed by various reasons, among them the advancement of science and technology. Admitting the importance of this didactic resource, as well as the increasingly necessary presence of the STS / STSE perspective in the school context, we propose in this work to analyze a collection of high school physics textbooks composed of three volumes, recommended by the Ministry of Education from Brazil and adopted at a federal institution in the interior of Maranhão. The investigation is guided by the following question “How do the textbooks analyzed include the perspective Science, Technology, Society and Environment in the presentation of school physics content?”. The applied methodology was based on Content Analysis with search for records of expressions used frequently in STS works and their variations linked to the Environment. The results show that the books provide activities relating scientific content with technological and socio-environmental contexts, however, it is characterized the use of the STS/STSE perspective as a complement or “STS graft” in most of the work.