Drafting guidelines towards an educational product to teach Geologic Time in brazilian basic education

Abstract

Geological Time is a keystone concept to Geosciences and an important one to Biological Sciences, in which geological time perspective is crucial to understand evolution. However, geological time notion complexity hinders its comprehension, causing problems in the appropriate understanding of geological and evolutionary processes. Investigations have been made in order to understand the causes of apprehension difficulties of this concept by students and to propose ways of teaching Geological Time in a high school context, even though Brazil is in serious need of research works on that subject. Our work analyses the development of guidelines to approach Geological Time in Brazilian basic education and it presents a didactic sequence proposal to teach Geological Time in high school Biology classes, built along the methodological approach of Design Research. Our guidelines and didactic sequence are historically oriented, based on Burchfield’s (1998) perspective, and on orientations from Pedrinaci and Berillos (1994), in addition to other investigations on Geological Time, Geosciences and Evolution teaching. Our main suggestions are stimulating debate on Earth’s age; approaching Geology’s history; working basic concepts of Geology, Paleontology, Stratigraphy and Geochronology; highlighting a dynamic image of Earth; spatially representing geological time scale; working with historical narratives, especially Earth’s; and discussing Geological Time’s economical, political and cultural implications.