Botany classes’ contextualization: a research work inside three Brazilian universities and a Portuguese one

Abstract

Contextualization is the act of linking knowledge to its origin and application. The purpose of the study is to understand how botanical teachers from three public universities in the state of São Paulo and a Portuguese university will contextualize scientific knowledge. Fifteen teachers from the four universities were observed throughout a semester. To analyze the data, we used the theory of land, in which all concepts are identified by data. As a result, it has been verified that most of the faculty mention examples of the botanical subjects they teach trying to relate the content to a more concrete reality. Historical contextualization is not addressed by most teachers, and so is the correlation between botanical knowledge and other topics in biology or subjects in other fields of knowledge. The lack of context in some classes underscores the difficulty teachers have in combining scientific knowledge with other issues in everyday student life.