Um material para professores de Física sobre o ensino de marés na Educação Básica

Abstract

Our work deals with teaching about a cyclical phenomenon that occurs daily with the waters of the sea, usually very familiar to people living on the coast, the tides. In addition to being present and even, in some cases, being a conditioning factor for the leisure moments of people on the beaches, this phenomenon presents relations with several socio-environmental situations in our surroundings. It influences the characteristics of coastal fauna and flora and the occurrence of essential ecosystems for marine life, such as mangroves, the dynamics of fishing activities and the functioning of ports, and determines the impact of constructions along the seafront in coastal cities. We realized that, despite having a vast coastline, teaching about tides is not very present in Basic Education, and there is still a shortage of published works on the subject in the area of Physics Teaching in Brazil. Considering the contradiction between the importance of the theme and its absence in teaching, we developed a material for the teacher - Inside the Tides - with the aim of stimulating and enhancing the exploration of knowledge that we think is relevant for teaching tides under a bias mainly from Physics and Astronomy. This material is in the form of a Module that presents the teacher with some reflections on the importance of the tides, trying to make it clear that the theme is relevant to high school. The material presents some of the main ideas and theories that have been proposed in the history of science to explain the tides and the challenges that the phenomenon offered for its understanding, with a more detailed explanation of the Theory of Equilibrium, which punctuated the gravitational origin for the phenomenon. We also present, in the material, the results of a research that we conducted in two schools in Rio Grande do Norte, on the previous conceptions of 115 students of the 1st year of High School, about the tides. The objective of this research was to understand how students interpret the tides and what they think originates them, as well as the possible relationships they establish between this phenomenon, aspects of their daily lives and their surroundings. With this systematized, it is expected that the teacher is more prepared to deal with the concepts that his class will present. Finally, we offer some didactic suggestions to assist in setting up a teaching plan that the teacher will produce on tides. In these suggestions, there are some proposals for practices that we were aware of through our experiences and our bibliographic research, as well as some software to illustrate the Equilibrium Theory and a list of accelerated videos from some coastal regions of Brazil and other countries, aiming to explain the various ways in which the intensity of the tides can manifest in different places. To assess the potential of our product to contribute to the insertion of the topic in High School, we sent it to a small group of licensed Physics teachers, four of whom were available to read the entire text and participate in a meeting to discuss their doubts and considerations about it. In this meeting, which lasted 3 hours and was recorded, the four teachers made important observations and suggestions that were incorporated into the review of the educational product. All teachers recognized the pertinence and need for the insertion of the theme of the tides in the teaching of Physics in Basic Education, and three of them stressed that the text has a lot to contribute in encouraging and supporting Physics teachers in this sense, as well in the provocation to deepen the dimensions addressed in the text. We hope, therefore, that these will become effective contributions of the material Inside the Tides.