Interdisciplinarity and Contextualization in the Higher Education Chemistry Course: An Investigation Enveloped in the Bias of the Animal Issue

Abstract

In this work, we start from the assumption that dealing with the animal issue in education has become increasingly relevant. This statement gains strength in the examination of official documents for education in its various modalities, since they seek to include themes that stimulate ethical, solidary and citizen thinking beyond the compartmentalized. Thus, we take as essential the act of “greening up” the disciplines taking into account what is contextual to them. With this in mind, we propose to carry out a survey in order to understand how Chemistry professors see contextualization and interdisciplinarity, which includes aspects of the animal issue, in their disciplines. For that, we defined a cut that covers public institutions of higher education in Minas Gerais, building an investigation through questionnaires previously submitted to the pilot experience and, later, to the content analysis. As part of the results, we bring the categories “The animal issue and its crossing” and “Pedagogical practices in the classroom”. From the treatment of the data, we discussed the hypotheses raised and we found that there are understandings both contrary to the insertion of the animal theme due to a scarce relationship between it and the course, and of not only being able to work in the classroom, but already being present, with the interdisciplinarity being a means for this inclusion.

Keywords

• animal issue
• interdisciplinarity
• teaching of chemistry