CONCEPTIONS AND PERCEPTIONS ABOUT “EXPERIMENTATION” IN CHEMISTRY TEACHING

A LOOK AT THE NARRATIVES OF A LICENSEE

Abstract

This work presents part of the results of the Course Completion Work of one of the authors, whose theme is Experimentation in Chemistry Teaching. This research sought to present the main results of an investigation, of ideas about the “experimentation”, of a graduate in Chemistry working in a state school in the southern region of Espírito Santo, which can influence and/or help essential elements of teaching practice: planning, execution, and evaluation of experimental activities. The methodological route of the research was based on the Narrative Interview as a data collection instrument, based on the studies by Jovchelovich and Bauer (2008). The interview with the only research collaborator was submitted to the Content Analysis, by Franco (2005), creating categories based on inferences that culminated in the corpus of this work. The results showed different conceptions of “experimentation” regarding the initial formative process and as a teaching professional of the graduate, among which they were remodeled from one period to the next. Initially, the licensee showed ideas about “experimentation” limited to experiments and a specific place, the laboratory, but it expands to the new and current conception of experimentation as a possibility of providing students with different experiences through different types of activity. The analysis of these categories suggests that the licensee's ideas about “experimentation” can support the teaching work with this type of activity, which allowed the construction of a list of concepts to think about the planning, execution, and evaluation of experimental activities in teaching.