A imagem fotográfica em livros didáticos de biologia: uma análise com base na semiótica

Abstract

In the school environment, images are widely used as a support for understanding verbal texts. They promote interactions with the reader, which is why they are part of textbooks encouraging learning by arousing students' curiosity. Photographic images, for example, due to their iconicity, are found in textbooks, especially in science and biology teaching, reinforcing information and establishing relationships to the referenced verbal text. They illustrate, give meanings, allow new interpretations and meanings about biological knowledge. But its use must be appropriate in the textbook, so that it allows the correct interpretation by the student and enables him to develop visual memory in face of the presented phenomena. In the present work, we have the following research question: what is the pedagogical function of photographic images in the activities of Biology textbooks? We use a qualitative descriptive approach, so that we can get closer to the reality of the studied objects. To achieve our goal, we analyzed the photographic images present in the activities of high school biology textbooks in public schools in the municipality of Areia – PB. We used Charles Sanders Peirce's Semiotic Theory for the analysis of photographs, seeking to understand the effects generated by signs from the reading of these images. The results indicate that the photographic images can play more than one role in a single context, however, the 'illustrative' role is still predominant in the analyzed textbooks. Thus, we believe that the semiotic representations provoked in the students' minds contribute to the understanding of the meaning process of these photographs and highlight the potential of these images as an important sign element for learning biology contents.