O conceito de vida nos livros didáticos de Biologia: Um percurso pela história

Abstract

Life is the object of study in biology and the target of countless discussions and controversies. On the one hand, those who defend that life can be conceptualized, on the other, those who claim that such a purpose cannot be fulfilled. This topic has been addressed in science and biology classes for decades, so we believe it is essential to understand how life has been addressed in high school textbooks over the years. With this purpose, we resorted to the collection of the Didactic Book Library, located at the Faculty of Education of the University of São Paulo, because it has a large number of books that have been produced over the years. As a result of the pandemic, the survey of works took place remotely. This research is bibliographical and qualitative and our main objective is to present how the concept of life is approached in textbooks over the years. We present the opinion of several authors on this topic and choose analysis categories to organize our understanding of how the subject is treated. Several questions are raised and different strategies and arguments are used by the authors to justify the concept and/or the lack of it in their works. The selection and analysis of books took place remotely, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. For general and initial information, we contacted the library coordinator via telephone and e-mail to collect data related to opening hours, policies for access to the collection, possibility of accessing material for research, among other aspects necessary for our investigation. Afterwards, we received from a spreadsheet with the list of all the works in the collection, we selected the most relevant ones for the research and sent them to the institution, which returned us with the digitized books in a folder on Google Drive. We arrived at this volume from the title, year of publication, authors and by examining a brief description present in each one. The 19 works chosen were informed to the coordination of the Library, which digitized them and sent them to us. Of the 19 works, 13 were considered relevant to our research, presenting the concept implicitly or explicitly, and 6 of them did not present the concept of life at all, so we excluded these from our analysis as well. With the analysis we note that not all works have a definition or make explicit mention of the term “life”. 31.6% of them do, but there is a significant number (36.8%) that do not make this record explicitly but implicitly, although they present texts that suggest a definition. From the analysis of the works, it was possible to notice that there are terms, words or expressions that are recurrent. We notice this both in works in which there is an explicit definition, as in those in which the definition came from our interpretation based on the text and context presented by the authors. Based on this observation, we chose 11 categories, from which we discussed the concept of life in the analyzed works.